The U.S. Climate Collection—a joint special collection of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and American Geophysical Union (AGU) announced in 2025—has published its first paper.
The U.S. Climate Collection is a first-of-its-kind collaboration that aims to provide a home for assessment-related research focused on climate change in the United States. This research will be made available to inform future U.S.-focused climate assessments at all scales.
The collection’s first paper, a commentary titled “Research priorities for robust climate assessments in the United States,” was published today in two journals: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society and Earth’s Future. It brings together 175 authors to outline research priorities that can inform future national, regional, local, sectoral, and topical climate assessments.
AMS Headlines spoke with the commentary’s lead authors, Melissa Kenney (director of research & knowledge initiatives at the University of Minnesota Institute on the Environment), Robert Kopp (distinguished professor in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences at Rutgers University), and Costa Samaras (Trustee Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University), about the paper’s significance and key highlights.
What makes this paper so timely?
As climate change impacts accelerate, the pace of assessment and integration of science with decision-making and action must accelerate as well. And many communities and businesses are moving forward with these efforts. Climate assessment is happening at multiple levels—local, regional, sectoral, and topical efforts—creating a network of climate assessment efforts that serve different scientific and decision-making purposes. While not an assessment itself, the U.S. Climate Collection—a joint effort by AMS and AGU—provides the foundational, peer-reviewed synthesis research to support this network of climate assessment efforts.
This paper is the first paper in the U.S. Climate Collection. It is intended to identify research priorities relevant to assessments across these levels. The most recent U.S. national climate assessment was published in 2023, and the scientific understanding has advanced significantly over the last several years.
Why is this commentary important to decision-makers and researchers?
Scientific assessments are critical in informing households, communities, businesses, institutions, and governments as they respond to intensifying climate hazards. In this paper, 175 volunteer authors, most of whom were part of former U.S. climate assessment efforts, outline research priorities for climate assessment in the U.S. These are topics that should be addressed in the next U.S. National Climate Assessment, as well as synthesis research that can inform other assessments at state, local, or sectoral levels. This research roadmap provides a charge to the scientific community to focus on areas that the broader community can work on now to ensure the public is informed by the best possible science on addressing the threats of climate change. This effort represents the power of scientific collaboration across disciplines to produce insights that can improve people’s lives, protect the environment, and advance scientific understanding for humanity.
The research priorities in the paper provide a roadmap of work needed to inform future national, regional, local, and sectoral climate assessments. Researchers at any stage of their careers can use the priorities outlined in this paper to identify societally important research gaps that need to be filled to support a network of future climate assessments. State and local leaders, the private sector, and the public can read the paper to learn about areas where there have been significant scientific advancements.
What are some emerging areas that a rigorous climate assessment should pay attention to?
The paper covers climate assessment opportunities and assessment-related research needs across many systems, settings, sectors, and U.S. regions. Some common themes that require focused research include:
- Assessing how greenhouse gas emissions are continuing to alter and amplify climate hazards, including how risks are changing across places, time scales, and emission pathways.
- Advancing research and synthesis on compound extremes and cascading climate risks, particularly how interacting hazards affect legacy policies, infrastructure, and institutions designed around historical climate conditions or individual extreme events.
- Strengthening understanding of interactions between climate and social systems, including how human behaviors, decision-making, institutions, and governance shape the distribution of climate impacts and the possibilities for climate responses.
- Evaluating climate responses as an integrated portfolio, including assessing how greenhouse gas emissions mitigation, climate adaptation, disaster management, climate interventions, and resilience strategies interact, and understanding the effectiveness, interactions, co-benefits, trade-offs, and unintended consequences across these different climate-informed actions.
How might researchers use the paper’s guidelines/priorities?
Researchers can use the paper’s suggested priorities to do what science does best—analyze a challenge, assess the evidence, publish peer-reviewed research, and communicate the results. Importantly, we encourage researchers to work on these priorities in collaboration with communities. Climate assessments are both the results and the process. The process of climate assessment research helps to build capacity and bring in a range of knowledge and expertise outside scientific institutions. This process builds a shared understanding of current and future climate changes necessary to support evidence-based decision-making.
Why did you decide to submit this paper to the U.S. Climate Collection?
As climate risks escalate, the need for rigorous scientific assessments and the syntheses and other research that inform them has never been greater. The AMS and AGU U.S. Climate Collection provides a broader perspective on the multidimensional aspects of climate change risks and solutions in the United States through synthesis and other assessment-related research papers. Papers in the collection will be particularly useful to the global research community and to decision-makers across public policy and industry to inform the assessment of risks and solutions to climate change. We are grateful that AMS and AGU have a longstanding partnership rooted in a shared commitment to advancing interdisciplinary Earth sciences and ensuring that climate research is available to support decision-making across all levels of society. We encourage everyone to learn more and submit their research ideas to the U.S. Climate Collection at usclimatecollection.org.
