Climate Change and Florida Groundwater Management—Actionable Data and Adaptations

Abstract

The state of Florida has both a great dependency on groundwater and susceptibility to climate change and thus provides a good case study to examine the amount and quality of information on the potential impacts to groundwater supplies and demands that is available and accessible to decision makers to guide their planning. Decision makers responsible for making and implementing adaptation plans require actionable information that is in a format that they can access and understand and can be used to guide decisions over the usual 20- to 50-year planning periods in the state. The existing climate change projections of higher temperatures and associated evapotranspiration, a modest and geographically variable change in annual rainfall, and sea level rise at close to the global rate provide only limited guidance to the very small segment of society responsible for making adaptation decisions. Instead, decision makers in the water sector will need to increase the resiliency of their systems to be able to handle a wide range of possible future conditions.