The Bureau of Reclamation recently released its Climate Change Adaptation Strategy.
The agency “will use leading science and engineering to adapt to human-caused climate change,” according to an April 20 news release. The strategy’s four goals focus on increasing water management flexibility, enhancing climate adaptation planning, improving infrastructure resilience and expanding information sharing.
“Climate change is impacting our communities, economies and the environment throughout the West,” Reclamation Commissioner Camille Calimlim Touton said in the release. “Through this strategy, Reclamation will work collaboratively with our federal and non-federal partners and incorporate climate change into our water and power management decisions to minimize climate change's impacts on western water into the future.”
The bureau’s Climate Change Adaptation Strategy has goals of increasing water management flexibility that includes improving reservoir operations and hydropower generation efficiency and “development of water treatment and water conservation technologies to relieve water scarcity” and improving watershed monitoring and forecasting.
Enhancing climate adaptation planning will include providing financial assistance through WaterSMART Grants and “development of guidance to better account for climate change in planning and related environmental reviews,” according to the Strategy. The bureau will expand information sharing by working with others “to develop quality-assured climate change information and then making that information publicly available.”
Reclamation will work toward increased hydropower activities, dam safety and infrastructure investments and innovation to improve infrastructure resilience, the Strategy reported.
In building this Strategy, the Bureau of Reclamation took information from the 2021 SECURE Water Act Report. That information includes "additional drought analyses based on paleohydrology (using tree rings)" that the bureau performed to get more information, according to the Strategy.
The Bureau notes those results give water managers information "to compare the frequency and severity of droughts that occurred several hundred years ago to projections of future droughts and develop water management strategies in time to take action," the Strategy reported.
The Climate Change Adaptation strategy supports the Biden administration's executive order on protecting public health and environment and restoring science to tackle climate crisis. The order required "all executive departments and agencies (agencies) to immediately review and, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law, take action to address the promulgation of federal regulations and other actions during the last four years that conflict with these important national objectives and to immediately commence work to confront the climate crisis."
