The Fifth National Climate Assessment is a congressionally mandated report that comes out every five years, most recently November 2023. With the goal of informing policy, scientists from across the country are selected for their expertise on climate science and it's wide reaching impacts.
Utah State University Professor Peter Howe spoke about his role on the most recent National Climate Assessment.
“So I was one of 500 volunteer authors on the Fifth National Climate Assessment Report. And I was one of 20 authors on the chapter on human health. In particular, how people are perceiving changing risks due to extreme heat, what the impacts are on Americans everyday lives," Howe said.
These reports are made every five years compiling information on climate change risks, impacts and responses across the US.
"Yeah, it's not published as a big book that someone will put on a shelf this time there's about 1,700 pages of material. And it's designed on the web, it's actually in digestible pieces," Mark Brunson said.
Brunson is a professor of environment and society at USU who was one of 14 authors on the chapter on climate issues in the Southwest.
“Our job was to review and assess the existing literature. So basically, what I did was read an awful lot of papers … so it was really nice to do something that we know is designed to influence policy," Brunson said.
To Howe, the key message in the human health chapter is that climate change is affecting the health of all Americans in a number of different ways.
“... physical health, mental health, spiritual health and well being and it is affecting everybody to different extent, to various extents, although it tends to affect people who are marginalized already, to a greater extent," Howe explained.
Since the report is mandated by Congress, the ultimate goal is to inform policy changes but the authors wanted it to be something accessible to all Americans.
“One of the things I love about the National Climate Assessment Report is that it's written to be accessible … there's a very accessible website with all the findings of the report, as well as a number of different ways to interact with the results," Howe noted.
