Riverine floods are among the most costly natural disasters in the United States, and floods are generally projected to increase in frequency and magnitude with climate change. Faced with these increasing risks, improved information is needed to direct limited resources toward the most cost-effective adaptation actions available. Here we leverage a newly available flood risk dataset for residential properties in the conterminous United States to calculate expected annual damages to residential structures from inland/riverine flooding at a property-level; the cost of property-level adaptations to protect against future flood risk; and the benefits of those adaptation investments assuming both static and changing climate conditions. Our modeling projects that in the absence of adaptation, nationwide damages from riverine flooding will increase by 20–30% under high levels of warming. Floodproofing, elevation and property acquisition can each be cost-effective adaptations in certain situations, depending on the desired return on investment (i.e., benefit cost ratio), the discount rate, and the assumed rate of climate change. Incorporation of climate change into the benefit-cost calculation increases the number of properties meeting any specified benefit-cost threshold, as today’s investments protect against an increasing frequency of future floods. However, because future expected damages are discounted relative to present-day, the adaptation decisions made based on a static climate assumption are very similar to the decisions made when climate change is considered. If the goal is to optimize adaptation decision making, a focus on quantifying present-day flood risk is therefore at least as important as understanding how those risks might change under a warming climate.

From hampering the ability of water utilities to fill their reservoirs to leaving forests parched and ready to burn, drought is a unique natural hazard that impacts many human and natural systems. A great deal of research and synthesis to date has been devoted to understanding how drought conditions harm agricultural operations, leaving other drought‐vulnerable sectors relatively under‐served. This review aims to fill in such gaps by synthesizing literature from a diverse array of scientific fields to detail how drought impacts nonagricultural sectors of the economy: public water supply, recreation and tourism, forest resources, and public health. We focus on the Intermountain West region of the United States, where the decadal scale recurrence of severe drought provides a basis for understanding the causal linkages between drought conditions and impacts. This article is categorized under: Human Water > Value of Water Science of Water > Water Extremes

The perception of environmental stimuli was compared across normal hearing (NH) listeners exposed to an eight-channel sinewave vocoder and experienced bilateral, unilateral, and bimodal cochlear implant (CI) users. Three groups of NH listeners underwent no training (control), one day of training with environmental stimuli (exposure), or four days of training with a variety of speech and environmental stimuli (experimental). A significant effect of training was observed. The experimental group performed significantly better than exposure or control groups, equal to bilateral CI users, but worse than bimodal users. Participants were divided into low, medium and high-performing groups using a two-step cluster algorithm. High-performing members were only observed for the CI and experimental conditions, and significantly more low-performing members were observed for exposure and control conditions, demonstrating the effectiveness of training. A detailed item-analysis revealed that the most accurately identified sounds were often temporal in nature or contained iconic repeating patterns (e.g., a horse galloping). Easily identified stimuli were common across all groups, with experimental subjects identifying more short or spectrally driven stimuli, and CI users identifying more animal vocalizations. These data demonstrate that explicit training in identifying environmental stimuli improves sound perception, and could be beneficial for new CI users.

As is the case for many semi-arid regions globally, drought in the Intermountain West of the United States is a recurrent, costly phenomenon that leaves few aspects of human and natural systems untouched. Here, we focus on drought impact data and evaluation challenges across four non-agricultural sectors: water utilities, forest resources, public health, and recreation and tourism. There are marked commonalities in the way drought indicators-that is, hydrometeorological conditions-are tracked, but considerable differences in how impacts are measured, evaluated, and disseminated. For drought indicator data, researchers and practitioners have a veritable smorgasbord of data at their fingertips. Such data are often spatially and temporally continuous, available at a wide variety of scales, and readily accessible through government-funded online portals. This is in stark contrast to drought impact data, which are typically collected opportunistically, if at all. These data are thus often limited in spatiotemporal scope and difficult to access relative to drought indicators. Concerningly, even within a given sector, the definition of drought impacts, quantitative or otherwise, can vary considerably, making it difficult to evaluate the true cost of drought. Far from being specific to the Intermountain West, these problems are found in most regions experiencing drought. We suggest such challenges are surmountable through the development of a common drought impact framework based around economic damages and purposeful, continuous, government-funded drought impact data collection. These tractable changes will allow for a better quantification of drought's true impacts under both present conditions and climate change scenarios in the Intermountain West and beyond.