2017 ESIP Summer Meeting

This session-within-a-session will cover two topics: Attendees will hear how Extension personnel encourage beef producers to consider and prepare for potential future conditions—all without saying "climate change." Then, session attendees will draw from the presentation to outline a case study for the Climate Resilience Toolkit (CRT). Attendees can use strategies from the session to highlight their own projects' accomplishments.

This is the 4th workshop sponsored by ESIP's Agriculture & Climate Cluster to develop CRT case studies.

Workshop agenda:

- [5 min] Introduction to the workshop, logistics, larger goal to establish a CRT pipeline at the ESIP level

- [10 min] LuAnn Dahlman, NOAA, Introduction to CRT, including a backwards journey from a CRT case study to the story template

- [20 min] Crystal Powers, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and USDA Northern Plains Climate Hub, Climate Scenario Planning for Resilient Beef Systems

Resiliency to weather extremes is, on the one hand, a topic with which farmers and ranchers in the Northern Plains are already familiar, because of the typical wide range in temperature and moisture conditions in the region. But now, climate change is adding new uncertainties that make it difficult to know what are the best practices for the future. In an ongoing project, the UNL Extension team used scenario planning with beef system stakeholders to discover robust adaptive management options, prioritize Extension programming needs, and provide an open forum for discussion.

[45 min] - Group discussion on and drafting of an incipient story that would become a CRT case study

[10 min] - Wrap-up: Next steps; CRT "pipeline" in OSF