Informing Climate Adaptation: Climate Impacts on Glacial Systems and the Role of Information Brokering in Climate Services

Recent climate changes show that the historical record is not an appropriate analog for future climate conditions. This understanding undermines decisions that have assumed climate stationarity, and consequently the demand for climate information has increased in order to help frame climate risk more appropriately. However, deficits in knowledge about climate impacts and weak connections between existing information and decision-makers are two barriers that limit the use of climate information. In research presented here, I showcase results that address knowledge gaps in the impact of climate on glacial resources in Bolivia, South America. I present a mixing model analysis using isotopic and anion tracers to estimate that glacial meltwater contributed about 50% of the water to streams and reservoirs in La Paz region of Bolivia during the 2011 wet and 2012 dry seasons. To assess how future warming may impact water supplies, I develop a temperature-driven empirical model to estimated changes in a future glacial area. Surface temperature changes were extracted from two multi-model ensembles of global climate models produced for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fifth assessment report driven by greenhouse gas emission scenarios RCP 4.5 and 8.5. In both scenarios, glacial area declines are substantial. While these results address a knowledge gap, the extent to which they inform resource management is unknown because the research was conducted without an explicit connection to resource management. Information produced in this fashion is generally acknowledged as being less immediately useful for decision-making. These challenges may be mollified, however, with information management strategies. Therefore, I present results from an experiment to investigated if contextualizing existing climate-related information helps facilitate use. During a drought-afflicted period in Arizona and New Mexico, a monthly synthesis of climate impacts information was disseminated to more than 1400 people. Survey responses from 117 people indicate the information in the synthesis at least moderately influenced the majority of those decisions. Also, more than 90% of the respondents indicated the synthesis improved their understanding of climate and drought. These and other results demonstrate that routine synthesis of existing information can help enhance access to and understanding of climate information.