Big Week for Climate Change and Ecological Research Programs

House Appropriations Bill backs requests for increases in support on climate change initiatives and encourages NSF to support NEON, while the White House releases its first major report on climate change, illustrating the importance of programs like NEON.

~~The FY 2010 House Appropriations Bill of the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies was released this week, and with it a report that touts the value of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the future growth of the U.S. economy and the importance of science and technology to the nation.

The report encourages the NSF to “establish a mechanism” to “bring together the terrestrial ecological research community, including… the new NEON distributed observing system.”

The report also notes that the NSF budget is on course to double by 2016.

The release of the bill and report coincides with the recent release of a White House report on climate change, which highlights the need for reducing our vulnerability and increasing our resilience to ongoing climate change in proactive ways. “This report provides the concrete scientific information that says unequivocally that climate change is happening now and it's happening in our own backyards and it affects the kind of things people care about," Dr. Janet Lubchenco said at a White House briefing.

White House advisor John Holdren said in a statement that report findings make the case for taking action to slow global warming – both by reducing emissions and adapting to the changes that “are no longer avoidable.”

NEON will serve as a research platform for discovering and understanding the impacts of climate change on ecology and will provide comprehensive data for science advisors to make decisions to help the U.S. adapt to climate change.