Great Lakes

This guide is intended to help communities in Michigan and across the Great Lakes Region develop a climate and health adaptation plan or to integrate climate and health concepts into existing initiatives. A climate and health adaptation plan is defined here as a strategy document that fosters collaboration across disciplines and interest groups to instigate a series of activities toward the common objectives of understanding and then preventing or reducing the anticipated health impacts of climate change in the area.

The Working Group II contribution to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report assesses the impacts of climate change, looking at ecosystems, biodiversity, and human communities at global and regional levels. It also reviews vulnerabilities and the capacities and limits of the natural world and human societies to adapt to climate change.

The Sea Level Rise Technical Report provides the most up-to-date sea level rise projections available for all U.S. states and territories; decision-makers will look to it for information.

This multi-agency effort, representing the first update since 2017, offers projections out to the year 2150 and information to help communities assess potential changes in average tide heights and height-specific threshold frequencies as they strive to adapt to sea level rise.

This Guide is written for practitioners already using or wanting to use future climate information in their work, but who are not familiar with the underlying assumptions and choices surrounding climate data. Here, we introduce the climate model scenarios that are used to “drive” climate models forward in time. These scenarios are a combination of socioeconomic and climate forcing pathways. We summarize differences between these scenarios for the Great Lakes region to show users how their choice of model scenario affects future temperature and precipitation projections.

This Health Impact Assessment was done in conjunction with the development of an adaptation plan, with the goal of ensuring that the strategies developed would be health-focused before implementation. By conducting the HIA during the Climate Change Adaptation Plan’s development, greater efficiencies were created in terms of addressing strategy-specific, health-related issues that could be avoided at the start, rather than discovering them after the strategies had already been implemented.