NOAA's Climate Program Office has unveiled its Strategic Plan for 2015-2019.

The plan leverages CPO's position at the intersection of NOAA"s science and service missions, the climate research community, and the broader climate enterprise to help guide the office towards its vision: "People, businesses and the environment thriving in the face of climate impacts."  The plan will also enable the office to lead a research agenda and forge partnerships that enhance society's ability to make effective decisions.

The office has arranged all of its strategic objectives around four major goals:

1. Partnerships - Promote partnerships that build on mutual strengths and interests, and advance the value and impact of CPO work.

2. Integrated climate research - Achieve a fully integrated research program to advance scientific understanding, monitoring, modeling and prediction of climate and its impacts to enable effective decisions.

3. People & culture - Empower people and their role in the organization to sustain a highly skilled and competent workforce prepared to deal with changing needs and conditions.

4. Business processes - Adapt CPO’s infrastructure, management practices, and business processes to sustain high performing and responsive programs, products, and services.

The plan is organized to provide a strategic roadmap for climate that guides CPO’s research agenda and forges partnerships that enhance society's ability to make effective decisions.  Additionally, the Strategic Plan stresses integration and coordination across CPO's and NOAA’s climate assets and maps out research-to-operations strategies for improving NOAA’s service delivery in all of NOAA's line offices through development of prototype tools, including early warning systems for preparedness and response.

The CPO Strategic Plan, which has been prepared with extensive input from internal and external stakeholder communities, articulates how NOAA will address the Societal Challenges identified by the Climate Goal, advance understanding, and accelerate improvements in operational products and services for effective decision making. It affirms a strong commitment to both integrative activities in support of key Societal Challenges as well as to the Foundational Capabilities that sustain these activities and further our scientific understanding of climate. 

Next steps include developing a five-year Implementation Plan and an improved process for developing Annual Operating Plans beginning in FY15 that will link strategy and execution. 

To download a PDF of the report, click here: CPO Strategic Plan.pdf