Coastal Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerabilities - Climate ...

Adaptation and Mitigation 1113. Advances in Technology: We highlight five trends in climate change tools. Table4-1 shows examples of tools that typify each trend.• Variety: The past three decades has seen a proliferation of tools used in a varietyof tasks from city planning to conservation. Much of this growth can be attributedto the rise of desktop computers and the introduction of geographic informationsystems (GIS).• Accessibility. Web-based and open-source tools have to fill the “digital divide”created by the need for proprietary GIS, software or highly specialized training.(Rozum, et al., 2005)• Sophistication of tools: Increasingly, tools address multiple factors such asthe combined effects of land use and climatic change on water quality or integratinginformation and assessment across biomes or taxa by exploring theprojected distribution of tree and bird species under several climate changescenarios.• Sophistication of tool use: Some users are combining tools into interoperabletoolkits for analyses and decision support that single tools cannot provide,including assessing multiple scenarios for management decisions, outcomes, orclimate impacts.4. Locally specific applications: Tools specifically addressing climate change in thecontext of particular sectoral or regional needs are also being developed at a rapidpace.Selecting and Using Tools AppropriatelyAs more tools are developed, mechanisms to guide users to the most appropriate toolsfor their context and question are increasingly important. The dearth of effective guidancehas been frequently noted (e.g., Mcleod et al., 2010); common complaints includeoutdated information or guidance that is either too generic, too specific to particular sectorsor geographies, or too complex.Growing attention has focused on addressing this need, including the developmentof case studies focused on tool selection and use such as NOAA’s Digital Coast, EBMTools Network, workshops or “tools cafes” targeting particular sectors or regions (Culveret al., 2010, regional workshops in California and the Great Lakes, and tools cafes inthe National Conservation Training Center’s Vulnerability Assessment trainings), andtools guidebooks (COS, 2011). The 2008 revision of UNFCCC’s Compendium on Methodsand Tools to Evaluate Impacts of, and Vulnerability and Adaptation to, Climate Change is themost comprehensive effort to date, providing information on more than 100 tools ina standardized format. The sheer scope of such a comprehensive compendium makesit difficult to search in a static format; consequently, several groups have developedsearchable on-line tools databases such as the Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchangeand the EBM Tools Online Database.Despite the above efforts, few, if any, systematic assessments have been made of howgroups or individuals select and access tools or of the degree to which particular toolsare actually useful in various settings (Center for Ocean Solutions, 2011; Hagemann et