Adapting to Climate with NOAA RISA in the Intermountain West (CO,WY,UT)

The NOAA Climate Program Office's Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) program invests in research and engagement that expands regional capacity to adapt to climate change in the U.S. RISA's regional teams build sustained relationships between decision makers and researchers that support collaborative and equitable adaptation to climate risks. In Fiscal Year 2021, the RISA program launched 9 new 5-year RISA teams. This webinar series is a venue to introduce each team, discuss major themes and partners, and preview the projects that will advance climate knowledge and adaptation capacity in their regions.RISA's Intermountain West region includes the states of Colorado, Utah, and Wyoming. The RISA team, Western Water Assessment (WWA), is based at University of Colorado Boulder, the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), the University of Wyoming, and the University of Utah. This RISA team's vision is to build water sector and community resilience to compound hazards in the Intermountain West, with a particular focus on underserved Indigenous and small rural communities and utilities. By carefully constructing their activities, WWA will also advance resilience science from theory to practice. The team has developed an integrative set of 10 projects and other research and integration activities that draw on their 20-year history of climate adaptation research and activities in the region, and the deep interdisciplinary social and natural science expertise in their team. Their research projects fit within two themes: resilient water systems and resilient communities, and they will integrate tracking of resilience metrics to identify needs and opportunities and evaluate their success in building resilience. The team will also conduct a small-grant competition to develop a network in Wyoming to build resilience of underserved communities and leverage successes to inspire other communities to engage in climate adaptation actions.