National indicators of climate changes, impacts, and vulnerability

Climate assessment efforts in the USA are a legally required and important process to share the state of knowledge about status and projected trends of climate changes and impacts and are used to support risk management decisions and policies One of the major gaps in our ability to effectively conduct assessments as a scientific community has been the challenge of systematically tracking climate impacts relative to a baseline, especially their magnitude and distribution for socio-environmental systems and sectors, and to assess the effectiveness of our climate actions (Janetos and Kenney 2015). Indicators have been proposed as a means to address this gap.