Project funded by the National Science Foundation, 2019-2023

SERI is working on the project under a subcontract with the Research Foundation CUNY - Advanced Science Research Center City University of New York


Project Overview

In recent years, growing evidence suggests that human-induced global warming is increasing the periodicity and intensity of extreme weather events such as heatwaves, floods, intense precipitation, and drought. Since 1980 the U.S. has sustained 265 weather and climate disasters where overall damages/costs were at least $1 billion. The total cost of these 265 events exceeds $1.775 trillion.

Major risks to the environment and society from climate vulnerabilities are amplified by the interwoven nature of the food-energy-water system (FEWS). FEWS highlights the inherent linkages between individual food, energy, and water systems, including the competition in demand for water between food and energy production. The nation's FEWS are supported by both traditionally engineered and natural infrastructure that yield economic benefits yet do not operate in isolation of each other or Earth system dynamics. The U.S. agriculture and energy sectors together account for 78% of all freshwater withdrawals and 84% of all consumption, making these sectors collectively the largest user of water in the nation, and setting the stage for major inter-sectoral competition. Shifting patterns of drought and other severe weather in the U.S. have already lowered crop yields, raised food prices, with economic impacts extending well beyond the U.S. to countries importing our goods. In the electric power sector, changes in seasonal water shortage and elevated river temperatures are tandem concerns, reducing generation efficiencies, and constraining power generation during periods of peak demand. Complicating such tradeoffs are environmental regulations, like the Clean Water Act, with its thermal effluent limitations crafted well before climate concerns entered the policy domain. Understanding how climate-related shocks move through the FEWS is a major national imperative that will greatly impact the management of traditionally engineered (e.g., dams, irrigation, water treatment plants), natural infrastructure (e.g., land, aquatic systems), and their combination.

The goal of this project is to identify and evaluate response options to extreme weather in the context of engineered and natural infrastructure. The framework enables a systematic assessment of future policy options that will define the capacity of the regional FEWS to adapt to changing climate extremes and other environmental stressors from present-day to 2100.

This project focuses on two strategically important regions of the U.S., the Northeast (NE) and Midwest (MW) where FEWS will be exposed to risk from climate extremes.  The two regions are home to a significant fraction (~45%) of the US population (140M) and GDP ($6.7Tr) and are dominated by urban, suburban and agricultural land uses. FEWS in the northeast and Midwest are essential to the nation's prosperity and to international food security. Major decisions affecting global food production, biofuels, energy security and pollution abatement will require critical scientific support.

The project is investigating the dynamics of FEWS in two ways:

• First, we are considering how the FEWS is "wired together" and how its sensitivity to climate shocks evolves out of short-term events and longer-term trends through a retrospective analysis from 1950-present.

• Second, we are assessing potential interventions and climate adaptation strategies to manage FEWS, including alternate technology deployment, natural infrastructure management, and economic and regulatory policies over the next decades. Using a suite of integrated models we will investigate in a series of scenarios with stakeholders in the two regions how a) limits imposed on engineered and natural infrastructure arising from climate extremes will impact individual FEWS components as well as their linkages and limit the overall performance of the coupled FEWS system of the NE and MW and b) the impact of progressive climate change and its extremes can be attenuated by management decisions. We will co-construct the scenarios with the stakeholders and conduct dialogues with them to explore implications of management interventions to climate impacts in FEWS and their trade-offs.