Assessing the Ecological Risks of Climate Change to Inform Decision-making: Issues and Challenges. S. H. Julius and C. E. Rogers, US EPA
Understanding, predicting and managing the ecological effects of climate change is an extremely difficult task considering the large uncertainties in anticipated climate change, the unpredictable responses of species to change, the consequent alteration of ecosystems in the context of multiple stressors acting in concert, and the multiple demands on scarce resources. The ecological risk assessment framework may be used to characterize the risks of climate change and to develop appropriate risk management strategies. However, this framework may need to be altered or expanded to address some of the unique problems that climate change poses. Challenges to the ecological risk assessment framework include the large-spatial scales on which climate impacts will be experienced, the huge uncertainties associated with climate change, the complexity of stressors acting in concert, the need for method(s) to prioritize, a priori, the analyses to be tackled within the ecological risk assessment framework, and the need to include endpoints relevant to the decision-making process. Suggestions for amplification of, or modification to the ecological risk assessment framework will be made to address some of these complexities.
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