OUR CHANGING PLANET
The U.S. Climate Change Science Program
for Fiscal Years 2004 and 2005

See also press release (dated 25 Aug 2004)

Also available:

PDF version of the full report

The hardcopy version of this report is available free of charge from the GCRIO Online Catalog

Back to
Table of Contents

THE U.S. CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE PROGRAM

The U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) was launched in February 2002 as a collaborative interagency program, under a new cabinet-level organization designed to improve the government-wide management of climate science and climate-related technology development. The CCSP incorporates and integrates the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) with the Administration’s U.S. Climate Change Research Initiative (CCRI).

The USGCRP was established by the Global Change Research Act of 1990 to enhance understanding of natural and human-induced changes in the Earth’s global environmental system; to monitor, understand, and predict global change; and to provide a sound scientific basis for national and international decisionmaking.

The CCRI builds on the USGCRP, with a focus on accelerating progress over a five-year period on the most important issues and uncertainties in climate science, enhancing climate observation systems, and improving the integration of scientific knowledge into policy and management decisions and evaluation of management strategies and choices.

The Climate Change Science Program combines the near-term focus of the CCRI with the breadth of the long-term USGCRP. The interagency budget crosscuts of the USGCRP and CCRI are developed and maintained separately within the CCSP, but the program management structure is identical for both the USGCRP and CCRI components.

The CCSP must also integrate the products of capabilities that make essential contributions to global change research, but were outside the original USGCRP framework and budget crosscut. These include the operational environmental satellite system, various in situ ocean and atmospheric observing systems, and associated data centers. This will facilitate the transition of research observations into operational systems and the use of research products by mission agencies.