EPA’s Climate Indicators Report Details Worsening US Impacts

More frequent heat waves, a shorter snowpack season, and nighttime temperatures rising faster than daytime are some of the consequences of climate change brought into focus in the EPA’s updated Climate Change Indicators report.

The report, released Tuesday, details increasingly volatile conditions already being observed on land, in the air, and at sea as a result of climate change driven by human activity. It focuses on 39 of the Environmental Protection Agency’s 57 indicators of the causes and effects of climate change.

“EPA’s Climate Change Indicators report is an authoritative resource of how the climate crisis is affecting every American right now and with increasing intensity,” EPA Administrator Michael Regan said in a statement. “Extreme heat, flooding, and wildfires have become more common, harming human health, threatening livelihoods, and causing costly damage.”

The updated publication is the report’s fifth edition since it was first released in 2010.

While some of the impacts spelled out in the report—such as the increasing frequency of heat waves and coastal flooding—are already commonly associated with climate change, it details other challenges that are less widely known. For example, the report says that changes in sea surface temperatures, which rise as oceans absorbs carbon dioxide from the air, have damaged commercial and recreational fisheries that are a critical food source.

“Climate-related fishery losses have already resulted in billions of dollars of lost catch in recent years,” the report says, “directly harming jobs, livelihoods, and local culture.”

Climate change is also altering the natural change of seasons, according to the report, driving “wide-ranging impacts such as warmer winters, lakes thawing earlier, longer growing seasons, and worsening allergies for people.”

The report for the first time included data on heat-related workplace deaths: 986 workers died from exposure to heat in the US between 1992 and 2022, it found, more than one-third of them in the construction sector alone. The report came as the US Occupational Safety and Health Administration on Tuesday released a proposed rule to protect about 36 million indoor and outdoor workers from heat stress.

The only state to get a dedicated chapter in the report was Alaska, which it calls “uniquely vulnerable to climate change” because of its significant areas of sea ice and the permafrost that underlies 80% of its land.

“Entire ecosystems, communities, and Indigenous ways of life could vanish as these frozen features shrink or disappear,” the report says.

The other chapters touch on greenhouse gases, rising heat, extreme events, water resources, changing seasons, ocean impacts, and rising seas.