Critical Needs: Natural Hazards

To minimize the potential impact of natural hazards:

Encourage basic and applied research to strengthen community resilience. Geoscientists study the links between natural hazards and Earth processes and the ways natural hazards impact society. They identify hazard-prone areas through geologic mapping, seismic monitoring, and other investigations.

Critical Needs: Mineral Resources

To support a secure supply of minerals:

Assess the nature and distribution of domestic mineral resources. This basic information on the nation’s natural wealth is essential for government, industry, environmental, investment, and community decision making. Quantify domestic and global supply of, demand for, and flow of minerals.

Critical Needs: Energy

For an energy-secure nation:

Assess the quantity and location of energy resources. Geoscientists improve understanding of energy resources, helping decision makers to create robust energy policies and allowing energy producers to develop resources more efficiently.

Critical Needs: Climate Change

To better equip society for a changing climate:

Encourage research and improve models to understand the connection between Earth’s systems, human activity, and climate change. For more than four billion years, land, water, ice, and the ocean have helped shape, and have been shaped by, a changing climate. Understanding past climates through evidence preserved in the geologic record increases the accuracy of today’s climate models and the ability to forecast how ecosystems will respond to climate change.

American Geosciences Institute

critical needs