Climate 'Town Hall' planned for SNR

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The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's School of Natural Resources will host a full day of meetings, seminars and lectures in a "Town Hall" style forum that will discuss the forthcoming National Climate Assessment and its implications for the Great Plains region on Feb. 4, 2013.

UNL Chancellor Ronnie Green is expected to open the meeting with remarks, but a specific agenda of events has not yet been determined.

The Town hall meeting at UNL's Hardin Hall on East Campus will cover the Great Plains region—a vast, eight-state area, stretching from Montana and North Dakota on the Canadian border, all the way down through Texas. Other states joining Nebraska in the region are South Dakota, Wyoming, Kansas and Oklahoma.

The report is expected to be released sometime in December or early 2013. The last climate assessment report was issued in 2009.

The National Climate Assessment is a product of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, created by Congress in 1990. The program is supposed to release every four years a report to Congress and the President that details current scientific knowledge about the climate and its impacts globally, nationally and regionally. Among the stated goals are: To increase "understanding of what is known and not known about climate change," and help guide "climate science priorities."

The report is expected to evaluate a wide range of climate impacts on the country, and study how it affects specific regions within the United States. The report is expected to cover everything from human health and biodiversity to agriculture and energy supply and use.

UNL's town hall is believed to be the only planned meeting in the Great Plains region that will examine the National Climate Assessment. It will be sponsored in part by the Vice Chancellor's Office of Research, the School of Natural Resources, the Agricultural Research Division, the National Drought Mitigation Center and the High Plains Regional Climate Center.

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More information:
National Climate Assessment website
http://www.globalchange.gov/what-we-do/assessment

Great Plains region
http://www.globalchange.gov/publications/reports/scientific-assessments/us-impacts/regional-climate-change-impacts/great-plains