improve our understanding of the mechanisms of the Earth's climate system, the likely future course of climate change, and the potential impacts of such change on the environment and human society. The USGCRP, a program initiated by President Reagan and elevated to a Presidential Initiative under President Bush in 1989, was codified by the Global Change Research Act of 1990. The program has been strongly backed by every Administration and Congress since its inception. The FY 2000 Budget Request demonstrates President Clinton's ongoing commitment to the program, with an overall request for the USGCRP of approximately $1.8 billion dollars. Believing that policy should be based on sound science the Administration looks forward to working with the Congress to carry on this bipartisan tradition of support for global change research. The results obtained through the sustained USGCRP research effort over the past decade have been very helpful in U.S. government climate change policy deliberations. As we look ahead to the next decade of global change research, it is apparent that much of the USGCRP research effort will address questions of regional ecological impacts and rates of change, both of which are relevant to the decisions the United States and other countries must make about long term emissions trajectories beyond 2010, and the decisions that public and private sector decision makers must make about natural resource management and adaptation to climate change and climate variability. During much of the first decade of its existence, the USGCRP focused on observing and documenting change in the Earth's physical systems and understanding why these changes are occurring. It is now appropriately shifting from a nearly exclusive focus on physical systems to a much broader effort to understand how global change will affect the Earth's biological systems and the human societies that are dependent upon them. We need to move from the global to the regional level assessment of change and its potential consequences. Our current level of understanding tells us that climate change and its effects will vary by region, but we still do not have a good ability to project what will happen in any given location. We also need to find out more about the interactions of natural and human-induced climate change and variability, and other human-induced stresses on the environment, such as pollution and resource extraction, many of which are regional in scale. Additionally, we need to achieve an integrated understanding not only of the nature and extent of physical and biological effects of climate change, but of their ramifications for our social and economic systems. Even if we reduce future emissions of greenhouse gases, some further change is inevitable in Earth's climate as a consequence of emissions that have already occurred. The National Assessment effort now underway in the USGCRP is examining the degree to which the U.S. is vulnerable to climate change, how such change could impact the various regions of the U.S., and how we can best adapt and prepare for the future. The assessment is looking at both the next few decades and the next century. A series of regional and sectoral analyses are underway, as is the This type of assessment of the potential consequences of global changes is called for by the U.S. Global Change Research Act of 1990. During the last year, the USGCRP has been refining its research priorities as it engages in the process of developing a new, long-term research strategy for the next decade. A recent National Research Council (NRC) report, Global Environmental Change: Research Pathways for the Next Decade, which was commissioned by the USGCRP, has influenced the definition of the nearterm research challenges that are described in the FY2000 Our Changing Planet, the annual report and implementation plan of the USGCRP, and is also serving as important input for the long-term strategy. I anticipate that this new long-term strategy will be completed and forwarded to the NRC for comment during the course of this year. I look forward to discussing this activity with you in more detail in the future. An important structural change in the USGCRP this year is the organization and management of the program as a series of closely-linked program elements that are directly responsive to the scientific challenges described in the Pathways report: • Understanding the Earth's Climate System, with a focus on improving our understanding of the climate system as a whole, rather than focusing on its individual components, and thus improving our ability to predict climate change and variability. • Biology and Biogeochemistry of Ecosystems, with a focus on improving understanding of the relationship between a changing biosphere and a changing • Paleoenvironment and Paleoclimate, with a focus on providing a quantitative ⚫ Human Dimensions of Global Change, with a focus on explaining how humans • The Global Water Cycle, with a focus on improving our understanding of the Carbon Cycle Science Finally, Carbon Cycle Science is receiving heightened emphasis within the USGCRP. The need to understand how carbon cycles throughout the Earth's atmosphere, land, and water is critically important to the ability to predict and manage future climate change. This was among the strongest recommendations of the Pathways report, and in response, the USGCRP is establishing a Carbon Cycle Science Initiative, with significant new investments proposed in the FY 2000 budget. This effort will provide critical scientific information on the fate of carbon dioxide in the environment, the sources and sinks of carbon dioxide on continental and regional scales, and how sinks might change naturally over time or be enhanced by agricultural or forestry practices. A new level of interagency coordination is being put in place to pursue this important objective. The Departments of Agriculture, Energy, Interior, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Commerce's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and the Smithsonian Institution will all play important roles in this effort, guided by a science plan that has been drafted with extensive participation by many of the leading scientists in this field. The Carbon Cycle Science Initiative will employ a wide variety of research activities in a comprehensive examination of the carbon cycle as an integrated system, with an initial focus on North America. Comparison of North America to other significant regions will also be important for understanding the relative importance of our region in the global context. Atmospheric and oceanographic sampling field campaigns over the continent and adjacent ocean basins will be combined with atmospheric transport models to develop more robust estimates of the continental and subcontinental-scale magnitude and location of the North American carbon sink. Local-scale experiments conducted in various regions will begin to identify the mechanisms involved in the operation of carbon sinks on land, the quantities of carbon assimilated by ecosystems, and how quantities might change or be enhanced in the future. The initiative will also include evaluation of information from past and current land-use changes, both from remotely-sensed and historical records, to assess how human activity has affected carbon storage on land. Potential management strategies for maximizing carbon storage will be studied, including evaluation of the variability, sustainability, lifetime, and related uncertainties of different managed sequestration approaches. Finally, enhanced long-term monitoring of the atmosphere, ocean, forests, agricultural lands, and rangelands, using improved inventory techniques and new remote sensing, will be used to determine long-term changes in carbon stocks. Integration of new observations and understanding of carbon cycle processes in regional and global carbon system models will enable us to more accurately project future atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Two additional NRC reports have recently been issued that focus on the cross-cutting modeling and observation tools that support USGCRP research efforts across all these program areas. Both of these reports were commissioned by the USGCRP to provide guidance on how to improve its programs in these areas. Although they are critical of some aspects U.S. national efforts, it is important to note that the act of requesting these analyses was itself part of the USGCRP taking steps to improve its research efforts. The program has taken some major steps in the FY2000 budget proposal towards solving the problems identified, and the program will build on these initial actions in the new long-term strategy. Climate Modeling With respect to climate modeling, the Administration's FY2000 Information Technology for the Twenty-first Century Initiative will greatly improve U.S. climate modeling capabilities and management. The climate research community played an important role in shaping the initiative, and it will continue to contribute to its implementation over the next few years. One of the key problems identified by the NRC was lack of access to the world's most powerful supercomputers. The Information Technology Initiative will result in the creation and deployment of a new generation of U.S. supercomputers that will be made available to the U.S. academic community for a number of applications, including climate modeling. The development and operation of high end General Circulation Models is an extremely computerintensive application. The climate modeling community is clearly at the forefront of the research disciplines that require and are ready to make use of new computing capabilities. I want to emphasize, however, that improvements in computing power, while necessary, are not sufficient for the U.S. to once again be among the world leaders in high end climate modeling. We also need to enhance the collaborations between existing modeling centers and the academic community, and take full advantage of their efforts in the creation of the new capabilities envisioned in the Information Technology Initiative. The NRC report was critical of the organization of U.S. climate modeling efforts, but it argued for both maintenance of the U.S. distributed system and a degree of further centralization. The report argues that the research program needs new capabilities, but within a national effort that is well-integrated. One of the critical elements of defining the climate research plans for the USGCRP is the agreement on a revised strategy for climate modeling. DOE, NSF, NOAA, and NASA are working together with our office and OMB, through the National Science and Technology Council (NSTC), to assure a new level of integration and collaboration in USGCRP modeling efforts to enable us to get the most out of the new software and hardware that will result from the Information Technology Initiative. We must ensure that our plans integrate new capability into a new national effort that takes full advantage of the strengths of our academic and Federal Lab research community and that addresses important educational goals as well as technical objectives. The U.S., and the other nations of the world, stand to gain considerably from this effort. Improving the U.S. climate modeling capability, and contributing this improvement to the assessment work of the IPCC, will help provide the world with more accurate information about what is likely to happen as a consequence of various levels of emissions and other human activity. More importantly, such an improved capability will also ensure that the U.S. has the means to perform U.S.-specific modeling investigations. This capability cannot be guaranteed by relying on the work done by other nations. Ensuring that we can meet our national needs is the primary justification for the proposed increased expenditures in this area. Climate Observations Regarding climate observations, we also have a report from the NRC that warns of gradual degradation of U.S. capabilities. It is important to place this in the proper context. Since the beginning of the USGCRP in the late 1980's, observations have been a major focus. Throughout the lifetime of the program, a major effort has been underway to develop new, more comprehensive, increasingly accurate measurement systems, driven by a consensus on the need for improved observational capability to address the broad suite of global environmental changes. Over the past several years, many in the national and international climate science community have pointed to the fact that this long-term effort to develop broad new capabilities has not prevented some serious problems. The existing operational observing systems upon which climate science has relied for long-term systemic data are designed mainly to meet weather (short-term) rather than climate (long-term) requirements. Design changes, and, in some cases, gradual degradation of these systems are further hampering their ability to support climate research. For the most part, such systems are funded and managed completely outside the context of the USGCRP. For instance, neither the National Weather Service, nor NOAA's weather satellite programs are part of the USGCRP. So while we are developing important new capabilities, our ability to continue collecting some of the most important existing long-term climate data sets is not assured. It is simply a matter of different agencies with programs having different missions. This widely recognized problem led the USGCRP to commission the “Adequacy of Climate Observing Systems" report from the NRC's Climate Research Committee. The report recommended that agencies should work through the USGCRP process and at higher government levels on a number of important actions, including stabilizing the existing operational capability and building climate observing requirements into the operational programs as a high priority. As in the case of the NRC modeling report, the recommendations are proving helpful in the continuing development of USGCRP observational capabilities. Improving the U.S. climate observations capability has been and remains an important Administration priority. In addition to continued strong support for the development new observational capabilities, our FY2000 budget proposals have made a start at addressing the problems described in the NRC report. The FY2000 budget proposals including augmenting NOAA's in situ observing networks (including the cooperative observer network, rain gauges, and ocean buoys), and data management activities to assure that data are available and accessible to the scientific community and other users. The USGCRP is also taking steps to improve collaboration between research satellite and in situ measurement programs (where new techniques are developed and tested) and operational satellite and in situ programs (which provide assured sources of data over the longterm). The USGCRP program today is on the threshold of a major transition. Over the next several years, in addition to continuing to improve our understanding of the Earth's environment and how |