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Western North Carolina Vitality Index
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A tool developed to provide information necessary in protecting the region’s unique natural resources, promote development and planning that accommodates healthy growth, preserve the heritage and culture that defines communities, and strengthen public health to improve local economies. The Index was developed by University of North Carolina-Asheville National Environmental Modeling and Analysis Center from the result of a partnership between the US Forest Service, the NC Mountain Resources Commission, the Blue Ridge National Heritage Area, the Asheville Board of Realtors and Duke Energy. The current iteration of the index contains over 160 different data metrics for each of the western 27 counties in NC. The information is classified into natural, built, human and economic sectors. Data and maps can be downloaded, spatially examined, and compared with state and national averages. A map viewer function allows users to customize their own maps for specific reports, grant applications, and general education and various presentations.
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Cultural Resources
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Socioeconomics
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Socio-economic Tools
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Central Appalachia Prosperity Project
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The Central Appalachia Prosperity Project is part of the Presidential Climate Action Project to develop policy recommendations on climate and energy security, with a focus on what the next President of the United States could accomplish using his or her executive authority. The Central Appalachian Project draws on the input of America's most innovative experts to produce policy and program recommendations that are sufficiently bold to expedite the region's transition to a clean energy economy. An important component of these recommendations has been better coordination of the efforts being made by all levels of government - federal, regional, state and local.
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Cultural Resources
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Socioeconomics
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Socio-economic Projects
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Global non-linear effect of temperature on economic production
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Growing evidence demonstrates that climatic conditions can have a profound impact on the functioning of modern human societies (1,2), but effects on economic activity appear inconsistent. Fundamental productive elements of modern economies, such as workers and crops, exhibit highly non-linear responses to local temperature even in wealthy countries (3,4). In contrast, aggregate macroeconomic productivity of entire wealthy countries is reported not to respond to temperature (5), while poor countries respond only linearly (5,6). Resolving this conflict between micro and macro observations is critical to understanding the role of wealth in coupled human–natural systems (7,8) and to anticipating the global impact of climate change (9,10). Here we unify these seemingly contradictory results by accounting for non-linearity at the macro scale. We show that overall economic productivity is non- linear in temperature for all countries, with productivity peaking at an annual average temperature of 13 6C and declining strongly at higher temperatures. The relationship is globally generalizable, unchanged since 1960, and apparent for agricultural and non-agricultural activity in both rich and poor countries. These results provide the first evidence that economic activity in all regions is coupled to the global climate and establish a new empirical foundation for modelling economic loss in response to climate change (11,12), with important implications. If future adaptation mimics past adaptation, unmitigated warming is expected to reshape the global economy by reducing average global incomes roughly 23% by 2100 and widening global income inequality, relative to scenarios without climate change. In contrast to prior estimates, expected global losses are approximately linear in global mean temperature, with median losses many times larger than leading models indicate.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Human domination of the biosphere: Rapid discharge of the earth-space battery foretells the future of humankind
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Earth is a chemical battery where, over evolutionary time with a trickle-charge of photosynthesis using solar energy, billions of tons of living biomass were stored in forests and other ecosystems and in vast reserves of fossil fuels. In just the last few hundred years, humans extracted exploitable energy from these living and fossilized biomass fuels to build the modern industrial-technological-informational economy, to grow our population to more than 7 billion, and to transform the biogeochemical cycles and biodiversity of the earth. This rapid discharge of the earth’s store of organic energy fuels the human domination of the biosphere, including conversion of natural habitats to agricultural fields and the resulting loss of native species, emission of carbon dioxide and the resulting climate and sea level change, and use of supplemental nuclear, hydro, wind, and solar energy sources. The laws of thermodynamics governing the trickle-charge and rapid discharge of the earth’s battery are universal and absolute; the earth is only temporarily poised a quantifiable distance from the thermodynamic equilibrium of outer space. Although this distance from equilibrium is comprised of all energy types, most critical for humans is the store of living biomass. With the rapid depletion of this chemical energy, the earth is shifting back toward the inhospitable equilibrium of outer space with fundamental ramifications for the biosphere and humanity. Because there is no substitute or replacement energy for living biomass, the remaining distance from equilibrium that will be required to support human life is unknown.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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THE COST OF INACTION: RECOGNISING THE VALUE AT RISK FROM CLIMATE CHANGE
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The asset management industry—and thus the wider community of investors of all sizes— is facing the prospect of significant losses from the effects of climate change. Assets can be directly damaged by floods, droughts and severe storms, but portfolios can also be harmed indirectly, through weaker growth and lower asset returns. Climate change is a long-term, probably irreversible problem beset by substantial uncertainty. Crucially, however, climate change is a problem of extreme risk: this means that the average losses to be expected are not the only source of concern; on the contrary, the outliers, the particularly extreme scenarios, may matter most of all.
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Climate Science Documents
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Too late for two degrees? Low carbon economy index 2012
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Even doubling our current rate of decarbonisation would still lead to emissions consistent with 6 degrees of
warming by the end of the century. To give ourselves a more than 50% chance of avoiding 2 degrees will
require a six-fold improvement in our rate of decarbonisation.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Growing feedback from ocean carbon to climate
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The finding that feedbacks between the ocean’s carbon cycle and climate may
become larger than terrestrial carbon–climate feedbacks has implications for the
socio-economic effects of today’s fossil-fuel emissions.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Allowable carbon emissions lowered by multiple climate targets
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Climate targets are designed to inform policies that would limit the
magnitude and impacts of climate change caused by anthropogenic
emissions of greenhouse gases and other substances. The target
that is currently recognized by most world governments1 places a
limit of two degrees Celsius on the global mean warming since
preindustrial times. This would require large sustained reductions
in carbon dioxide emissions during the twenty-first century and
beyond2–4. Such a global temperature target, however, is not sufficient
to control many other quantities, such as transient sea level
rise5
, ocean acidification6,7 and net primary production on land8,9.
Here, using an Earth system model of intermediate complexity
(EMIC) in an observation-informed Bayesian approach, we show
that allowable carbon emissions are substantially reduced whenmultiple
climate targets are set. We take into account uncertainties in
physical and carbon cycle model parameters, radiative efficiencies10,
climate sensitivity11 and carbon cycle feedbacks12,13 along with a
large set of observational constraints. Within this framework, we
explore a broad range of economically feasible greenhouse gas scenarios
from the integrated assessment community14–17 to determine
the likelihood of meeting a combination of specific global
and regional targets under various assumptions. For any given
likelihood of meeting a set of such targets, the allowable cumulative
emissions are greatly reduced from those inferred from the temperature
target alone. Therefore, temperature targets alone are unable
to comprehensively limit the risks from anthropogenic emissions.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Amazon Basin climate under global warming: the role of the sea surface temperature
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The Hadley Centre coupled climate–carbon cycle model (HadCM3LC) predicts loss of the Amazon
rainforest in response to future anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. In this study, the
atmospheric component of HadCM3LC is used to assess the role of simulated changes in midtwenty-first
century sea surface temperature (SST) in Amazon Basin climate change. When the full HadCM3LC SST anomalies (SSTAs) are used, the atmosphere model reproduces the Amazon Basin climate change exhibited by HadCM3LC, including much of the reduction in Amazon Basin rainfall. This rainfall change is shown to be the combined effect of SSTAs in both thetropical Atlantic and the Pacific, with roughly equal contributions from each basin. The greatest rainfall reduction occurs from May to October, outside of the mature South American monsoon (SAM) season. This dry season response is the combined effect of a more rapid warming of the tropical North Atlantic relative to the south, and warm SSTAs in the tropical east Pacific. Conversely,
a weak enhancement of mature SAM season rainfall in response to Atlantic SST change is suppressed
by the atmospheric response to Pacific SST. This net wet season response is sufficient to prevent dry
season soil moisture deficits from being recharged through the SAM season, leading to a perennial
soil moisture reduction and an associated 30% reduction in annual Amazon Basin net primary
productivity (NPP). A further 23% NPP reduction occurs in response to a 3.58C warmer air
temperature associated with a global mean SST warming.
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Resources
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Climate Science Documents
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Accounting for Environmental Assets
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A country can cut down its forests, erode its soils, pollute its aquifers and hunt its wildlife and fisheries to extinction, but its measured income is not affected as these assets disappear. Impoverishment is taken for progress
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Climate Science Documents
