Research Needs

7.0 RESEARCH NEEDS

As climate impact assessment moves to a more participatory process, the research undertaken

needs to reflect practitioner/stakeholder as well as researcher views of what is needed to

understand climate change, the impacts, and adaptive responses.  To reflect this dialogue, a list

of research needs has been compiled from numerous climate change workshop and symposia

reports, and climate impact assessment documents (Mortsch et al., 1998; Hofmann et al., 1998;

Mills and Craig, 1999; Fisher et al., 2000; Scott et al., 2000; Sousounis and Bisanz, 2000;

Arnell  et al., 2001; Gitay et al., 2001; Grondin and Gosselin, 2002).  This is an extensive list

that needs further refinement through dialogue within the Great Lakes community on what

needs to be done to address climate change.  Much emphasis has been placed on understanding

biophysical systems and clearly more attention needs to be placed on understanding human and

institutional behaviour in the face of a changing climate.

Also, assessing the sensitivity of beneficial uses to climate change uncovered numerous topics

where there has been little or no research in the Great Lakes region.  The tables in Chapter 4

highlight the gaps specifically; however, the general needs are incorporated below.  

The research needs are organized into themes including: monitoring/surveillance/analysis,

climate change scenarios, model development, vulnerability, impact and adaptation assessments,

economic assessment, adaptation, and communication.

7.1 MONITORING/SURVEILLANCE/ANALYSIS

Long-term monitoring of systematically gathered environmental and socio-economic data is

critical.  Reliable data are required from which to make decisions, calibrate models, and make

projections.  Similarly, these data are important to understanding patterns of variability, for even

without climate change the recent past may not be a reliable guide for management due to other

agents of change.  

Needs include:

•

Critical assessments of current monitoring programs with adjustments identified to meet

future needs;

•

Collaboration and protocols for common methods of monitoring that allow

intercomparison of data collected in different cities, states, or provinces (e.g. disease

surveillance information; climate data);

•

Gathering baseline data for the evaluation of climate, hydrological, water quality, and

ecosystem variability and trends over time to provide context for changing climate;

•

Monitoring and analysis for detecting changing climatic, hydrologic, water quality, and

ecosystem conditions (using indices that are relevant to stakeholders and practitioners as

well as researchers);

•

Monitoring and analysis to corroborate climate change impacts (e.g. duration of effects,

spatial extent of effects, changes in species or processes) identified in impact

assessments;

•

Monitoring, surveillance, and analysis for detecting human health issues (e.g.

distribution and abundance of insect vectors and the pathogens that they carry; heat-

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