University of Arizona - Arizona Institute for Resilience: Solutions for the Environment and Society

Building Regional Food System Resilience in Southern Arizona - Learning from COVID-19

From 2020 through spring 2021, this project aimed to document the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic in the local food system in Pima County, Arizona. The evolving crisis highlighted several long-standing issues in the local food system, including inequities in food access, food policy, food production and distribution, and food sovereignty. The crisis also revealed strengths in the local food system and opportunities to address these issues while building capacity and resilience. Our 2021 report synthesizes people’s experiences and lessons learned over the past year, in support of building a strong and equitable food system in southern Arizona that is resilient to future environmental, climate, economic, and health risks.

The next phase of research seeks to build on these findings through data collection, interviews, network building, and focus group discussions. Current project goals include: a) conducting in-depth analyses on cascading economic, climatic, and societal risks in the local food system over time, b) bolstering local partnerships between food businesses, organizations, and researchers, and c) developing a coordinated strategic plan for building local food system resilience and equity in the southern Arizona region.

Monsoon precipitation is difficult to forecast and analyze. Daily and seasonal precipitation are commonly used, but other sources of data, such as citizen science monitoring, could be integrated into a higher resolution and more accurate monsoon assessment framework. Tucson has dozens of observations collected by these networks, along with datasets based on radar and weather models. A central monsoon data repository would form a dense network of observations, facilitate innovative visualizations, and offer an unparalleled high-resolution view of regional precipitation patterns. This project is testing a process to combine southwestern data networks into an integrated monsoon assessment database and data visualization platform.

The Monsoon Viewer shows current monsoon precipitation patterns, based on specific requests from National Weather Service as well as other emergency management stakeholders. They want next day decision support tools for post-event management – researchers designed the viewer with this application in mind. We are exploring a real-time use for the dataset, but the focus is on short term post-event recovery and management. http://monsoon.environment.arizona.edu/

The Southwest U.S. Summer Monsoon Season Precipitation Mapping Tool. This mapping tool is a near real-time monsoon season precipitation mapping system developed in May 2019. https://cals.arizona.edu/climate/misc/SWMonsoonMaps/current/swus_monsoo….

Monsoon Season Station Summaries can be found at this link: https://cals.arizona.edu/climate/misc/stations/monsoon/current.html

Both of these tools were recently added to the National Weather Service’s Tracking the Monsoon webpage: https://www.wrh.noaa.gov/twc/monsoon/monsoon_tracker.php

Arizonans have long dealt with high temperatures and limited water resources, and climate change may increase the magnitudes of these challenges by causing increases in heat and the severity and frequency of droughts. Understanding how the public views climate issues is of considerable interest to a wide range of people, including policymakers, resource managers, health officials, researchers, educators, and others. Although many national surveys have described climate change attitudes, these studies have interviewed only small samples of Arizona residents and have yet to explore in depth the views of state residents. This report summarizes the results of a survey of public opinion that was commissioned by the University of Arizona and Stanford University to provide a better understanding of how the Arizona public views climate change. The results help guide the CLIMAS mission to serve the Southwest and its residents through research and outreach. More information can be found at http://www.environment.arizona.edu/climate-survey

Sky Island Alliance is working with partners including the NOAA-funded Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS), the Udall Foundation U.S. Institute for Environmental Conflict Resolution, EcoAdapt, the University of Arizona Institute of the Environment, and School of Natural Resources and the Environment to connect leading planners and thinkers in natural resource management and conservation with experts on regional climate impacts and adaptation. Through this project researchers seek to increase resilience in the region by ensuring implementation of climate-smart, landscape level management and conservation. Tools include a climate change adaptation survey, the Arizona Climate Change Network (Sky Island Alliance), and climate change adaptation workshops.

The Southwest Climate Outlook (SWCO) sum­marizes climate and weather information from disparate sources in nonscientific language, providing more than 1,500 people with timely climate-related information. Since SWCO's inception in 2002, stemming from the END InSight project, the publication has evolved into a tool for two-way communication with stakeholders and a platform for responding to needs throughout the region. The SWCO audience is very diverse, including people in the water sector, farmers, ranchers, research scientists, and interested citizens, among others.

The Southwest is one of the most sensitive regions of the U.S. to climate change and variability. It is essential to understand the full scope of climate variability and change in the Southwest and how to communicate in ways that enable effective decision mak­ing. The goals of this project are to (1) lead efforts to communicate about climate variability and change to decision and policy makers in, and relevant to, the Southwest, and (2) make climate knowledge useful for stakeholder understanding and decision making.