Our October 2009 report on climate change adaptation found no coordinated national approach to adaptation, but our May 2011 report on climate change funding cited indications that federal agencies were beginning to respond to climate change more systematically. About the same time as the issuance of our October 2009 report, Executive Order 13514 on Federal Leadership in Environmental, Energy, and Economic Performance called for federal agencies to participate actively in the Interagency Climate Change Adaptation Task Force. The task force, which began meeting in Spring 2009, is co-chaired by the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), and includes representatives from more than 20 federal agencies and executive branch offices. The task force was formed to develop federal recommendations for adapting to climate change impacts both domestically and internationally and to recommend key components to include in a national strategy. On October 14, 2010, the task force released its interagency report outlining recommendations to the President for how federal policies and programs can better prepare the United States to respond to the impacts of climate change. The report recommends that the federal government implement actions to expand and strengthen the nation’s capacity to better understand, prepare for, and respond to climate change. These recommended actions include making adaptation a standard part of agency planning to ensure that resources are invested wisely and services and operations remain effective in a changing climate. According to CEQ officials, the task force will continue to meet as an interagency forum for discussing the federal government’s adaptation approach and to support and monitor the implementation of recommended actions in the progress report. The task force is due to release another report in October 2011 that documents progress toward implementing its recommendations and provides additional recommendations for refining the federal approach to adaptation, as appropriate, according to CEQ officials. Individual agencies are also beginning to consider adaptation actions. For example, in May 2009, the Chief of Naval Operations created Task Force Climate Change to address the naval implications of a changing Arctic and global environment. The Task Force was created to make recommendations to Navy leadership regarding policy, investment, and action, and to lead public discussion. In addition, the U.S. Department of the Interior issued an order in September 2009 designed to address the impacts of climate change on the nation’s water, land, and other natural and cultural resources. Among other things, the order requires each bureau and office in the department to consider and analyze potential climate change impacts when undertaking long-range planning exercises, setting priorities for scientific research and investigations, developing multi-year management plans, and making major decisions regarding potential use of resources. In another example, according to NOAA, its Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) program supports climate change research to meet the needs of decision makers and policy planners at the national, regional, and local levels. In October 2009, we reported that some state and local authorities were beginning to plan for and respond to climate change impacts. We visited three U. S. sites in doing the work for that report—New York City; King County, Washington; and the state of Maryland—where state and local officials were taking such steps. We have not evaluated the progress of these initiatives since the issuance our 2009 report.  New York City: New York City’s adaptation efforts stemmed from a growing recognition of the vulnerability of the city’s infrastructure to natural disasters, such as the severe flooding in 2007 that led to widespread subway closures. At the time of our October 2009 report, New York City’s adaptation efforts typically had been implemented as facilities were upgraded or as funding became available. For example, the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP), which manages water and wastewater infrastructure, had begun to address flood risks to its wastewater treatment facilities. These and other efforts are described in DEP’s 2008 Climate Change Program Assessment and Action Plan. Many of New York City’s wastewater treatment plants, such as Tallman Island, are vulnerable to sea level rise and flooding from storm surges because they are located in the floodplain next to the bodies of water into which they discharge. In response to this threat, DEP planned to, in the course of scheduled renovations, raise sensitive electrical equipment, such as pumps and motors, to higher levels to protect them from flood damage.  King County, Washington: According to officials from the King County Department of Natural Resources and Parks (DNRP), the county took steps to adapt to climate change because its leadership was highly aware of climate impacts on the county. For example, in November 2006, the county experienced severe winter storms that caused a series of levees to crack. The levees had long needed repair, but the storm damage helped increase support for the establishment of a countywide flood control zone district, funded by a dedicated property tax. The flood control zone district planned to use the funds, in part, to upgrade flood protection facilities to increase the county’s resilience to future flooding. In addition to more severe winter storms, the county expected that climate change would lead to sea level rise; reduced snowpack; and summertime extreme weather such as heat waves and drought, which can lead to power shortages because hydropower is an important source of power in the region. The University of Washington Climate Impacts Group, funded by NOAA’s RISA program, has had a long-standing relationship with county officials and worked closely with them to provide regionally specific climate change data and modeling, such as a 2009 assessment of climate impacts in Washington, as well as decision-making tools.  Maryland: Maryland officials took a number of steps to formalize their response to climate change effects. An executive order in 2007 established the Maryland Commission on Climate Change, which released the Maryland Climate Action Plan in 2008. As part of this effort, the Maryland Department of Natural Resources (DNR) chaired an Adaptation and Response Working Group, which issued a report on sea level rise and coastal storms. The 2008 Maryland Climate Action Plan calls for future adaptation strategy development to cover other sectors, such as agriculture and human health. Additionally, Maryland provided guidance to coastal counties to assist them with incorporating the effects of climate change into their planning documents. For example, DNR funded guidance documents to three coastal counties—Dorchester, Somerset, and Worcester Counties— on how to address sea level rise and other coastal hazards in their local ordinances and planning efforts. In our prior work, we found that the challenges faced by federal, state, and local officials in their efforts to adapt to climate change fell into several categories:  Focusing on immediate needs. Available attention and resources were focused on more immediate needs, making it difficult for adaptation efforts to compete for limited funds. For example, several federal, state, and local officials who responded to a questionnaire we prepared for our October 2009 report on adaptation noted how difficult it is to convince managers of the need to plan for long-term adaptation when they are responsible for more urgent concerns that have short decision-making time frames. One federal official explained that “it all comes down to resource prioritization. Election and budget cycles complicate long-term planning such as adaptation will require. Without clear top-down leadership setting this as a priority, projects with benefits beyond the budget cycle tend to get raided to pay current- year bills to deliver results in this political cycle.” Insufficient site-specific data. Without sufficient site-specific data, such as local projections of expected changes, it is hard to predict the impacts of climate change and thus hard for officials to justify the current costs of adaptation efforts for potentially less certain future benefits. This is similar to what we found in past work on climate change on federal lands. Specifically, our August 2007 report demonstrated that land managers did not have sufficient site-specific information to plan for and manage the effects of climate change on the federal resources they oversee. In particular, the managers lacked computational models for local projections of expected changes. For example, at the time of our review, officials at the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary said that they did not have adequate modeling and scientific information to enable managers to predict the effects of climate change on a small scale, such as that occurring within the sanctuary. Without such modeling and information, most of the managers’ options for dealing with climate change were limited to reacting to already-observed effects on their units, making it difficult to plan for future changes. Furthermore, these resource managers said that they generally lacked detailed inventories and monitoring systems to provide them with an adequate baseline understanding of the plant and animal species that existed on the resources they manage. Without such information, it is difficult to determine whether observed changes are within the normal range of variability.  Lack of clear roles and responsibilities. Adaptation efforts are constrained by a lack of clear roles and responsibilities among federal, state, and local agencies. Of particular note, about 70 percent (124 of 178) of the federal, state, and local officials who responded to a questionnaire we prepared for our October 2009 report on adaptation rated the “lack of clear roles and responsibilities for addressing adaptation across all levels of government” as very or extremely challenging. For example, according to one respondent, “there is a power struggle between agencies and levels of government…Everyone wants to take the lead rather than working together in a collaborative and cohesive way.” These challenges make it harder for officials to justify the current costs of adaptation efforts for potentially less certain future benefits. A 2009 report by the National Research Council discusses how officials are struggling to make decisions based on future climate scenarios instead of past climate conditions. According to the report, requested by the Environmental Protection Agency and NOAA, usual practices and decision rules (for building bridges, implementing zoning rules, using private motor vehicles, and so on) assume a stationary climate—a continuation of past climate conditions, including similar patterns of variation and the same probabilities of extreme events.