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176 assessment of climate change in the southwest united statesBox 9.2Adaptation to Climate Change in the Marine Environment: The Gulf ofFarallones and Cordell Bank National Marine SanctuariesIn 2010, a joint advisory committee for the Gulfof Farallones and Cordell Bank National MarineSanctuaries, located off the central California coast,published a report on climate change impacts(Largier, Cheng, and Higgason 2010). The studydetermined that climate change will affect the region’smarine waters and ecosystems through acombination of physical changes—including sealevelrise, coastal erosion and flooding, changesin precipitation and runoff, ocean-atmospherecirculation, and ocean water properties (such asacidification due to absorption of atmosphericCO 2)—and biological changes, including changesin species’ physiology, phenology, and populationconnectivity, as well as species range shifts. Withthis foundational document in hand, sanctuarymanagers held a series of workshops aimed at developingan adaptation framework that involvedboth the sanctuaries and their partners onshoreand in the marine environment. From those effortsand underlying studies, they determinedthat the success of adaptation strategies for themarine environment will depend not only on themagnitude and nature of climatic changes, butalso on the pressures that already exist in marineenvironments, including the watershed drainageto the sanctuaries. For example, an adaptationstrategy for estuaries and near-shore waters thataddresses the changing timing and amount of waterfrom spring snowmelt or more frequent winterstorms will also require knowledge about whetherthe watershed is urbanized, agricultural, or relativelyundeveloped. Efforts to foster marine ecosystemadaptation to climate change will requireboth stringent measures that reduce the globalconcentration of CO 2in the atmosphere and thereduction of additional pressures on the regionalmarine environment (e.g. air pollution, runofffrom land into the ocean, waste disposal, and theloss of the filtering and land stabilization servicesof coastal wetlands) (Kelly et al. 2011).In 2010, the California Ocean Protection Council issued interim guidance for stateand local agencies to use for project planning and development in response to projectedsea-level rise (see Table 9.1; CCAT 2010). The same year, the state governments of California,Oregon, and Washington, along with federal agencies—the National Oceanicand Atmospheric Administration, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the Army Corps ofEngineers—initiated a study with the National Research Council (NRC) to develop regionalWest Coast estimates of future sea-level rise to better inform state and local planningand agency decisions (Schwarzenegger 2008). The NRC report was released in June2012.Changes or trends for other coastal environmental conditions, such as atmospherictemperatures, precipitation patterns, river runoff and flooding, wave heights and runup(waves reaching landward), storm frequency and intensity, and fog persistence, areless well understood, often to the point of uncertainty about the direction of change,much less its extent for a specific region. In addition, there will be other changes fromrising sea level. For example, “extreme events”—such as the contemporary understandingof 100-year floods—will occur more frequently as a result of both higher coastal