ARIZONA, USA — A new report released this week details the increasingly dire consequences of global warming and urges government and corporate leaders to mainstream new technology that reduces CO2 emissions immediately.
“The way I like to think about it is this is the decisive decade to make changes to mitigate the effects of climate change and adapt to the effects that are already occurring,” said Dave White, director of ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation.
White is the lead author of the Southwest for the U.S. Fifth National Climate Assessment, which analyzes the effects of global climate change on the United States.
“Deep, rapid” reductions in greenhouse emissions needed
Among the findings by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change:
- “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land” more than one degree Celsius.
- The world is not on track to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius – a threshold that will cause mass extinctions and mass migrations of people worldwide.
- Civilization needs “deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions."
- Technology to reduce harmful CO2 emissions must be mainstreamed.
“We do have time. But that window of opportunity is closing,” White said.
ASU researchers meet with Governor Hobbs’s team
Adaptation is why White and other ASU researchers met with the governor’s new climate resilience team this week. Facing a hotter, drier future, state leaders plan to use technology and policy reforms to preserve access to water.
“ASU is pulling together its deep bench of water experts to focus on how we can work together with stakeholders in Arizona to provide solutions,” said Sarah Porter, Director of the Kyl Center for Water Policy.
Enlarging Bartlett Dam could store water
Strategies include stricter limits on outdoor water use, new partnerships with tribal communities that allow them to share unused Colorado River water, determining how to tap into a groundwater basin west of Phoenix, and enlarging the Bartlett dam on the Verde River.
“Enlarging it means more water could be saved and that would effectively be a new water supply for the greater Phoenix area,” Porter said.
Porter said two agencies, the Central Arizona Project and Salt River Project, have teamed up to allow water from one system to be used for another.
“Enlarging the dam would be a solution for parts of town that don’t have access to SRP water now and will find themselves not having the same amount of Colorado River that they’ve enjoyed in the past,” Porter said.
Twenty-two stakeholders are working with the governor’s office on water conservation solutions.
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