great desire for that in the farming community, to hear the dollars and cents that are associated with these practices and how they can help the farms’ bottom line.” (R09)
● “I wanted to get into the economics of climate change because when you read about any envi ronmental topic, it doesn’t matter what it is, within a paragraph or two, you’re going to start getting into the economics. Like ‘well climate change is a threat… why can’t we do something about it?’ Well, because the alternatives are costly …but it’s also costly to allow climate change to continue unabated. ” (R16) Leveraging Assets, Expanding Capacity, Connecting & Integrating Program Resources Many opportunities were noted where Extension could tailor, adapt, expand, scale, or complement existing programs to improve efficiency in delivery of climate and extreme weather programs. This includes leveraging, scaling and integrating across existing programs and geographic scales of delivery. ● To the question of whether Extension could and should be doing more with C/EW programs, one respondent replied “Oh, definitely, without a question. I mean, I think about the fact that we have a network across the United States in every state, every county or parish … our network, our reach, is huge. It's an untapped resource and how we can get our colleagues to be supported and doing this work nationwide is really important. Just thinking about the different ways that people are going to be affected by extreme weather events and heat waves and fires and smoke and hurricanes an d floods ...and I could go on.” (R05) ● “ We need to fit it in more. So it's more central and our programming just kind of tied in where we're having this climate change discussion in 4-H and in agriculture and most any programming ...we're in. It just needs that connection, it touches on everything that way. ” (R07) ● “There are so many ties to different programs that Extension does, but to have a running thread of climate change and extreme weather throughout those programs would be very powerful. ” (R05)
● “I mea n, just across everything to be able to have some sort of [climate] component in there just to bring more of an awareness of it. ” (R10)
● “Just being able to have some of those more local resources and not even necessarily local to the county but just like a regional forestry specialist who just covers 10 counties instead of 100.” (R03) ● “ There’s real opportunity, I think, through the Climate Hubs to get more money into local Extension programming … We get a bit of money from our Climate Hub and I’m really appr eciative of it but it’s not enough to do …the scale of work that I could see, you know working with rural communities on climate adaptation and planning and access to data is really huge and it would take a lot of money to do it.” (R04)
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