- Target: Extreme weather—especially flood, drought, and extreme heat—as well as beetle kill and other events usually related to a changing climate.
- Importance to Food & Agr: Extreme events can adversely affect the ability to grow, transport, and market food. Floods, droughts, and extreme heat clearly impact food production. Fires can drive customers from farmers markets and keep tourists away from affected areas completely. Beetle kill and fires can have short- and longer-term impacts on irrigation water supply from local watersheds. Floods can contaminate crops, and along with winter storms, they can complicate farm supply and food shipments. The prospects of more frequent and more severe droughts can discourage new and established farmers, gardeners, and ranchers.
- Issues: Just as food-producing ecosystems are severely impacted by extreme events, surrounding and more natural ecosystems are impacted as well, which in turn affects our agriculture. Climate change is a clear driver of many if not most extreme events, including extreme heat, increased droughts and floods, greater variability, and conditions more conducive to fires and beetle kills. A failure to acknowledge that the climate is changing, and that humans are the major cause, hampers progress in reducing additional climate change and further impacts on agriculture and our world.
- Observing Options: Air quality, water quality, precipitation, drought, wildlife, crop and livestock impacts, forest beetle kill, and forest health are key items to observe before, during, and/or after extreme events.
- Citizen Science: Many of the citizen science programs for other indicators in this section can be used to monitor conditions that may lead to extreme events, conditions during these events, and those during recovery. For example, monitoring precipitation can reveal drought conditions that may lead to a major fire; air quality observations can indicate how farmers market customers may be driven away by the fire; and water quality monitoring can show how quickly sediment loads in rivers recover after a fire. Local agencies may recruit volunteers as citizen scientists especially in the recovery stage of river and forest ecosystems.
