The third national climate assessment’s coastal chapter: the making of an integrated assessment

Coastal areas are on the front lines of the impacts of climate change. The immediate impacts of temperature, precipitation and sea-level change affect rich but already threatened ecological systems and the most populated, highly developed, and economically vibrant regions of human activity on the planet. The specific vulnerabilities, impacts and adaptation options and activities vary greatly across the coastal areas of the US. The charge given to the coastal chapter team of the third US National Climate Assessment (NCA3, released in May 2014) was to discern the key vulnerabilities and most important cross-cutting concerns across the extensive coastline of the US. This paper is a reflection on what the coastal chapter team accomplished and how it was done (including author selection, staff support, technical inputs, the chapter development process, within- and cross-chapter integration, the review process, the delivery and high-impact release, the timeline of key assessment steps, and evaluation of the chapter development process). It concludes with eight lessons that might inform the activities of future collaborative author teams writing transdisciplinary, integrated assessment reports. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht (outside the USA) 2016