in or demand among their clientele for mitigation-focused programs while another spoke to the challenges of mitigation-focused programming. ● “I very rarely hear talk of ‘we need to reduce emissions in the work we do…’ or ‘we need to stop X thing from happening…’ And there's probably some talk of that... I know there are discussions I'm less involved in about planning for urbanization in areas that are of high importance and high development likelihood. Yeah, there is some of that but I would say that most of it falls into the adaptation category. ” (R03) ● “I really have not worked at all on mitigation .” (R06) ● “Honestly in most of my programming I focus more on adaptation than mitigation... I would say it’s probably 90% [adaptation]” (R08) ● “I would say the majority of our work has been focused on adaptation. There was a brief period of time where maybe there was a little bit of mitigation emphasis but that was a very short kind of time frame and driven by some national policies and guidance at the national level, but quickly kind of transitioned.” (R10) ● “In the past two years or so, I think that the interest of the farming community and of other stakeholders in the state...their interest in mitigation has really grown. ” (R09) ● “The mitigation I think is important to building awareness and helping people understand what climate change is and [that] they can do something about it. ” (R07) ● “We will be at 450 parts per million. We will be …that’s not an opinion, just the facts. So I don’t go in there trying to deceive people and I tell them ‘if we want to talk about mitigation, what we need to do is talk about starting to make changes over the next ten, twenty, or thirty years that can prevent us from going from 450 up to 560 [parts per million] because …450 is definite and 560 is not so definite because we have more time.” (R16) Providing Practical, Applied Research & Cost-Benefit Information There is a clear need and demand for more applied, integrated research that can be used directly for individual and community decision making. Extension audiences want information that enables them to move from principles to practice. Respondents also revealed a deficit in information and lack of understanding among Extension and target audiences of the economics of climate change (costs and benefits in practical terms) so that communities can assess risk and take action. ● “I’d love to work more with municipal officials in this region to do some of the climate-smart planning , even if it’s just reviewing plans and ordinances and identifying areas where they could improve their climate resiliency. And then talk about the benefits that they could see in their own communities, regardless of whether or not they believe in climate change, but framing it to identify what their interests are and how they could align with doing climate resiliency planning .” (R02)
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