Two UA Professors to Lead National Academies' Climate Panels

Kathy Jacobs and Diana Liverman will play an important role in guiding U.S. response to climate change.

Two University of Arizona professors whose research examines a range of issues on water, environment and sustainability have been named by the National Academies to head panels for a study on the nation's response to climate change.

The National Academies include the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, the Institute of Medicine and the National Research Council.

Kathy Jacobs, executive director of the Arizona Water Institute, has been appointed as chair of the study on Adapting to the Impacts of Climate Change. Diana Liverman, incoming co-director of the Institute for Environment and Society at the UA, will become vice-chair of the study on Informing Effective Decisions and Actions Related to Climate Change.

Jacobs and Liverman will both sit on the main Committee on America's Climate Choices, which brings together scientists, and political, civic and business leaders, to convene a major summit in Washington, D.C., in spring 2009.

The committee also will coordinate the work of the four study panels that will examine the serious and sweeping issues associated with global climate change, including the science and technology challenges involved, and provide advice on responding with the most effective steps and most promising strategies. The two panels led by Jacobs and Liverman also will work closely with two other panels: Limiting the Magnitude of Future Climate Change and Advancing the Science of Climate Change.

Collectively, the activities of these committees will produce a broad, action-oriented and authoritative set of analyses to guide responses to climate change across the nation. The America's Climate Choices suite of activities will tap experts and stakeholders from a range of communities including academia, business and industry, different levels of government, non-governmental organizations and the international community to ensure that it responds effectively to the charge from Congress and serves the needs of the nation.

America's Climate Choices will focus on domestic-level actions that advance the U.S. response to climate change, although by necessity it will address issues that have significant international dimensions.

Kathy Jacobs brings her expertise in water management, stakeholder engagement and the challenges of water policy and climate change in the American west to the new study.  The Arizona Water Institute, which she heads, is a consortium of Arizona's three state universities.

The consortium is focused on water-related research, education, capacity building and technology transfer in support of water supply sustainability. Jacobs also is an associate director of the NSF Center for Sustainability of Arid Region Hydrology and Riparian Areas, or SAHRA, at the UA and professor and specialist in the UA department of soil, water and environmental science. 

Jacobs has more than 20 years of experience as a water manager for the Arizona Department of Water Resources, including 14 years as director of the Tucson Active Management Area. Her research interests include water policy, connecting science and decision-making, stakeholder engagement, use of climate information for water management applications, climate change adaptation and drought planning. 

She manages a collaborative research project in partnership with the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, enhancing the use of climate information for managing the Colorado River. Jacobs has a master's degree in environmental planning from the University of California, Berkeley. She was the author of the water sector chapter for the National Assessment of the Impacts of Climate Change, and a convening lead author of a Climate Change Science Program report, Decision-Support Experiments and Evaluations Using Seasonal-to-Interannual Forecasts and Observational Data: A Focus on Water Resources, which will be released next week. 

Jacobs also has served on five previous National Research Council panels, including the Committee to Review the U.S. Climate Change Strategic Plan.

Diana Liverman has broad interests in social science approaches to climate impacts and policy, and will draw on her research in Latin America and her recent experience as director of the Environmental Change Institute at Oxford University to contribute insights and lessons from other countries' successes and failures in responding to climate change.

In addition to her post at the UA Institute for Environment and Society, Liverman also holds appointments as senior research fellow in the Environmental Change Institute, or ECI, and professor of environmental science in the School of Geography and Environment at Oxford University.

Her research interests focus on the human dimensions of global environmental change including climate impacts on society, land use change, environmental governance and the impacts of climate change policy in the developing world. Her publications and her student's projects have a particular emphasis on climate impacts, vulnerability, adaptation and carbon management in Latin America.

At ECI Liverman has been responsible for interdisciplinary research programs that include the U.K. Climate Impacts Programme, the Oxford nodes of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change and U.K. Energy Research Centre and the Global Environmental Change and Food Security Programme of the International Council for Science's Earth System Science Partnership. She is associated with Oxford's James Martin 21st Century School and the Smith School for Enterprise and Environment.

While in the U.S., she has chaired the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Committee on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, and sat on science advisory committees for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the Inter-American Institute for Global Change.