Ag Policy Blog

GAO: 'USDA Needs to Better Communicate Climate Plan'

Todd Neeley
By  Todd Neeley , DTN Staff Reporter
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Although USDA has a plan in place to help U.S. farmers make adaptations for possible changes in climate, a new U.S. Government Accountability Office report said USDA is struggling to put together all of the pieces of its plan.

USDA's climate change priorities for agriculture include providing better information to farmers on future climate conditions, priorities that GAO said "generally align" with national priorities set by the Obama administration. Those priorities include promoting actions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, advancing climate science, developing tools for decision makers, and developing better projections of future climate conditions.

The GAO said the USDA is engaged in research efforts aimed at better understanding climate change's agriculture effects and in providing technical assistance to farmers. That includes using existing conservation and energy programs to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to sequester carbon. In addition, USDA's goal is to help farmers become more resilient to climate change.

However, the GAO said "the agency is not using its performance planning and reporting process to provide information on how it intends to accomplish this goal or to assess the status of its efforts in this area. According to the Government Performance and Results Act of 1993, as amended, an agency's performance plan is supposed to explain how the agency will accomplish its performance goals, and its performance reports are supposed to review the extent to which those goals have been met.

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"However, USDA performance plans for recent years have not provided a link between the agency's climate efforts and performance goals, and its recent performance reports have not provided information on whether the agency was meeting its performance measures related to climate change."

The GAO said USDA's performance measures fail to "capture the breadth" of the agency's climate efforts. The GAO said USDA officials made it known that "developing measures for the strategic goal on climate change was difficult. However, USDA has developed measures for other areas, such as conservation, where similar challenges existed. Without developing performance plans and reports that better reflect USDA's climate change efforts, USDA will have difficulty fully assessing its progress in meeting its climate change strategic goal and providing information on its progress to Congress and the public."

GAO noted that USDA faces challenges in "encouraging farmers" to take adaptive measures to climate change and to reduce emissions. "For example, USDA faces the challenge of turning the large amount of often technical climate research into readily understandable information," GAO said in its report. "To address this challenge USDA is, among other things, developing tools that summarize climate information and communicate research findings to farmers in a more accessible format.

"USDA also faces a challenge related to the incentive structure that farmers consider when making decisions for their farms. Farmers weigh the financial costs and returns of taking certain actions, but USDA has not provided much information to farmers on the economic costs and returns of taking certain adaptation or emissions reduction actions, such as changing the extent to which they plow their fields."

The GAO said that federal internal control standards require agencies to "ensure there are adequate means of communicating with external stakeholders when it may have a significant impact on the agency achieving its goals.

"Without information that is readily accessible to farmers on the farm-level economic costs and returns of taking certain actions in response to climate change, farmers may be reluctant to take these measures," GAO said.

Read the full report here, http://www.gao.gov/…

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