Kathleen Miller

Dr. Kathleen Miller is a Scientist III working with RAL’s Climate Science and Applications Program. She is an economist who conducts research on climate impacts, vulnerability and adaptation. Her work focuses especially on natural resource management and adaptation planning under uncertainty, and on modeling interactions between human strategic behavior and dynamic natural systems. She collaborates with scientists from other disciplines to understand how natural resource systems will respond to the combined impacts of natural climate-related processes, direct human exploitation, other anthropogenic stressors and management actions.   She is the author of numerous papers on the management of water, fisheries and other natural resources in the context of climate variability and prospective climate change.

Much of Dr. Miller’s recent work has focused on water resource planning in the context of the potential impacts of climate change.    Her work includes serving as a lead author of the IPCC Technical Paper on Climate Change and Water and Chapter 3 in IPCC Working Group II, Fourth Assessment Report.

Other publications include: Climate Change and Water Resources: A Primer for Municipal Water Providers (Awwa Research Foundation, 2006).

In addition, she has played an active role in coordinating multidisciplinary research on climate variability and marine fishery management by serving as a Working Group co-chair and member of the Scientific Steering Committee of the international CLIOTOP (Climate Impacts on Oceanic Top Predators) Project.

She received a B.A. in anthropology and M.A. and Ph.D. in economics from the University of Washington.

Details on other aspects of Dr. Miller’s research can be found under the Research and Projects tab.

Conservation of Animal
Migrations in a Changing Climate Water Resources in a
Changing Climate International Fisheries, Strategic
Behavior and Climate Variability

Conservation of Animal Migrations in a Changing Climate

Miller, Kathleen A., 2011.  Conservation of Migratory Species in a Changing Climate: Strategic Behavior and Policy Design, Environmental Law, 41: 573-598.

This paper is a contribution to a multidisciplinary effort to examine the implications of climate change for the preservation of animal migrations as a phenomenon of abundance.  The project focuses, in particular, on the legal and policy aspects of animal migration conservation.  This paper describes how the theory of games, can be used to understand the implications of strategizing behavior for migratory species conservation.  This understanding can then inform the design of effective conservation policies and treaties.

Water Resources in a Changing Climate

Climate change will have substantial impacts on water resource availability, water quality and the destructive potential of storms and floods.  Dr. Miller has contributed to efforts to summarize and communicate the best available scientific understanding of these impacts and to evaluate human and ecosystem vulnerabilities to changing hydrologic conditions.  In addition, she has worked with urban water providers and international organizations to provide guidance on planning for water sector adaptation to climate change.

UNEP MCA4Climate Project

Kathleen Miller, 2011.  Adaptation Theme Report:  Improving Water Resource Management.  Contribution to the MCA4climate initiative.  MCA4climate: A practical framework for planning pro-development climate policies. UNEP, Paris.

Kathleen Miller and Valerie Belton, 2011. Case Study:  Water Resources Management and Climate Change Adaptation in the Sana’a Basin, Yemen.  Contribution to the MCA4climate initiative.  MCA4climate: A practical framework for planning pro-development climate policies.  UNEP, Paris. 

This multidisciplinary, international project provides guidance on the application of multi-criteria analysis methods for climate change mitigation and adaptation planning. The material focuses on the planning needs of developing country governments. Overall, the MCA4 climate project addresses policy and planning needs in twelve theme areas – 4 focused primarily on climate change mitigation, and 8 on adaptation.  Dr. Miller’s  work focused on the development of sound adaptation policies and plans for water resources management.  She authored the project’s chapter on water resources and led an exploratory assessment of the applicability of the approach to the case of Yemen’s dire water resource situation.  All project materials are available online.

Water Governance and Climate Adaptation

Kathleen A. Miller, 2010. Grappling with Uncertainty:  Water Planning and Policy in a Changing Climate, Environmental & Energy Law & Policy Journal, 5: 395-416.

This paper provides an overview of the current state of scientific understanding of the impacts of global climate change on water resources, and highlights some of the management challenges that will result from the inherent uncertainties surrounding these projected impacts.  It then draws on historical water policy experience to develop implications for changes in water law and management strategies to promote adaptation alternatives that are robust to uncertainty, resilient to surprise and readily adaptable to changing conditions and new information.

IPCC Contributions

Z.W. Kundezewicz, L.J. Mata (Coordinating Lead Authors); N. Arnell, P. Döll, P.Kabat, B. Jimenez, K. Miller, T. Oki, Z. Sen and I. Shiklomanov (Lead Authors), et. al., 2007.  Chapter 3 – Freshwater Resources and their Management.  Climate Change 2007:  Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, 173-210.

This chapter focuses on the implications of climate change for freshwater resources and their management. Climate change will interact with many other stresses to affect the reliability and usability of water supplies as well as water-related hazards. Climate change impacts on freshwater availability, flooding hazards and water quality will play an important role in driving regional and sectoral vulnerabilities. Adaptation procedures and risk management practices are being developed and applied in some countries, but there remains a high potential for harmful impacts to result from the impacts of anthropogenic climate change on freshwater systems.

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Bates, B.C., Z.W. Kundzewicz, S. Wu and J.P. Palutikof, Eds.; (Lead Authors: N. Arnell, V. Burkett, P. Döll, D. Gwary, C. Hanson, B. Heij, B.E. Jiménez, G. Kaser, A. Kitoh, S. Kovats, P. Kumar, C.H.D. Magadza , D. Martino, L. J. Mata, M. Medany, K. Miller, T.Oki, B. Osman, J. Palutikof, T. Prowse, R. Pulwarty, J. Räisänen, J. Renwick, F.N. Tubiello, R. Wood and Z.-C. Zhao), 2008. Climate Change and Water. Technical Paper of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC Secretariat, Geneva, 210 pp.

This paper is a special report of the IPCC that provides a comprehensive summary and analysis of the research related to freshwater resources contained the various IPCC AR4 Working Group reports as well as earlier IPCC reports.  The goal of this report is to highlight the key role of the water cycle in the climate system and the importance of hydrological changes for human and natural systems.

Urban Water Supply Planning in a Changing Climate

David Yates and Kathleen Miller, 2011. Climate Change in Water Utility Planning: Decision Analytic Approaches.  The Water Research Foundation, Denver, 80pp.

This project engaged a select set of municipal water providers to develop a decision support process to facilitate assessments of water utility vulnerabilities and response options to prospective climatic changes. This project focused, in particular, on the problem of planning in the context of uncertainties surrounding the local-scale hydrologic changes, and emphasized the need to understand and manage the inherent uncertainties by adopting a risk-management approach to planning.  Each utility followed a recommended analytical process, with varying degrees of detail, to address their climate sensitive decisions and problems.

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Miller, K. and D. Yates, 2006. Climate Change and Water Resources: A Primer for Municipal Water Providers. Denver, CO: AwwaRF and UCAR. 83 pp.

Many  managers of urban water utilities have only a limited understanding of climate change and how it may affect their ability to continue serving their customers' needs in a cost-effective and environmentally sustainable manner. This knowledge gap impelled the American Water Works Research Foundation (AwwaRF) to seek NCAR's assistance in providing information to municipal water industry professionals about climate change, its implications for the drinking water industry and strategies to plan most effectively to manage those impacts.

In response to this request, RAL scientists Kathleen Miller and David Yates developed a program to engage urban water providers in developing an educational resource for the drinking water industry about climate change and its potential impacts on water supplies and the operation of urban water systems. The project began with a workshop involving representatives of major urban water utilities in the U.S., Canada, and Europe as well as scientists from NCAR, the university community, government agencies and consulting firms. The project team then worked with industry representatives to develop material for the educational resource — a book and accompanying CD. The book, Climate Change and Water: A Primer for Municipal Water Providers, alerts urban drinking-water professionals to the fact that global climate change may have large impacts on the availability, quality, and cost of water to meet consumer demands.

Navigating Climate Change Information and Data: A Guide for Water and Wastewater Utilities:

The project team conducted a rapid assessment to identify, evaluate and organize currently available information sources in the global knowledge base -- including public domain tools, guidance, and data sets that might usefully comprise a water utilities’ tool kit for evaluating climate change impacts and response options.  Two products were generated under the project:

Wilby, R. and K. Miller, 2008. Navigating Climate Change Information and Data: A Guide for Water and Wastewater Utilities – Phase I: Compendium of resources, tools and international methods.  Report to Awwa Research Foundation & Co-funders, Denver, CO., Aug. 8, 2008.

Ten technical briefing papers. These are designed to provide a quick overview of key topics, a snapshot of their applicability to the planning needs of water and wastewater utilities, and references to relevant literature.

R. Wilby and K. Miller, 2009. Climate Change and Water Technical Briefing Papers, the Water Research Foundation. 

1. Climate Variability and Change;
2. Detecting Hydrological Change;
3. Climate Models and Scenarios;
4. Rationale and Application of Regional Climate Downscaling;
5. Climate Vulnerability Assessment;
6. Decision Support Tools for Adaptation Planning;
7. Water Resources Planning: Climate Change and Water Supply Reliability;
8. Water Demand Impacts and Utility Responses;
9. Water Quality Impacts and Utility Responses;
10. Coastal Zone Impacts and Utility Responses.

Earlier Work on Climate Change and Water

Dr. Kathleen Miller's research on water and climate change up to 2001 is described here, including an interactive map of projected impacts and references to source materials that she prepared in conjunction with work on the North America Chapter of the IPCC WGII Third Assessment Report. Dr. Miller's research focused on the following themes:

• Climate Change Impacts on Water
• Water Law and Institutions
• Water Banking and Drought Mitigation
• Additional References

International Fisheries, Strategic Behavior and Climate Variability

Kathleen Miller, Anthony Charles, Manuel Barange, Keith Brander, Vincent F. Gallucci, Maria A. Gasalla, Ahmed Khan, Gordon Munro, Raghu Murtugudde, Rosemary E. Ommer, and R. Ian Perry, 2010. Climate change, uncertainty, and resilient fisheries: Institutional responses through integrative science, Progress in Oceanography, 87: 338-346. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pocean.2010.09.014 | author's manuscript

This paper describes the shortcomings of marine-system management advice coming from uncoordinated individual disciplinary research efforts, and calls for a transition to an “integrative-science” process that would entail ongoing engagement of resource managers, users and an interdisciplinary scientific team in developing and adjusting management measures in response to evolving information on the state of the resource system.

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Miller, Kathleen, Peter Golubtsov and Robert McKelvey, 2011. “Fleets, Sites and Conservation Goals: Game Theoretic Insights on Management Options for Multinational Tuna Fisheries.”in Rosemary Ommer, Ian Perry, Philippe Cury, Kevern Cochrane (Eds.), World Fisheries: a Social-Ecological Analysis, Chapter 4, pp.60-88, Wiley-Blackwell, Hoboken, NJ. http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/9781444392241.ch4/summary

The management of tropical tuna fisheries is complicated by the highly migratory nature of the fish stocks, by the nature of the fisheries exploiting them, and by the effects of climate- driven variability in the location and productivity of the stocks. In addition to the management problems introduced by stock migrations across EEZ boundaries and into the high seas, particular challenges are presented by the fact that there are two distinct types of players who seek to derive benefits from these resources. Much of the harvesting is carried out by industrial fleets owned by citizens of distant-water fishing nations (DWFNs) who harvest tuna in the waters of a number of small-island and coastal nations, as well as on the high seas. Regional Fishery Management Organizations (RFMOs) have been established to control harvesting pressure and promote a fair division of fishery benefits in these fisheries. The outcomes of the policies pursued by these RFMOs will depend on the interactions among the fleets, the fishing sites, and the RFMO itself - an interplay that can be formally modeled as a multi-party harvesting and management game. This chapter describes such a model, and uses it to explore the consequences of alternative policies for:

1. the total returns to the fishery;
2. the condition of the fish stocks; and
3. the division of benefits between the fleets and the sites.

Model results suggest that policy consequences will vary considerably depending on the design of the policy and the biological and physical details of the situation. In particular, climate-related shifts in the distribution of the stocks between EEZs and the high seas can affect the biological and economic consequences of the RFMO policy choices. The implications of these results are discussed in light of current RFMO policy processes in the Western and Central Pacific.
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Miller, Kathleen, Peter Golubtsov and Robert McKelvey, 2010.  Asset Ownership, Climate Variability and Policy Design:  Game Theoretic Insights on Tuna Management Outcomes.  12 pp. In: Proceedings of the Fifteenth Biennial Conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics & Trade, July 13-16, 2010, Compiled by Ann L. Shriver. IIFET, Corvallis, Oregon, USA. CD ROM. ISBN 0-9763432-6-6 http://oregonstate.edu/dept/IIFET/publications.html | author's manuscript

Dr. Miller presented this paper at the 2010 conference of the International Institute of Fisheries Economics and Trade (IIFET). The paper has been published in the conference proceedings.  It uses the theory of strategic behavior to evaluate the consequences of various policy options that have either been implemented or that are actively under consideration for managing multi-national tuna fisheries in the Western and Central Pacific. The model, developed in collaboration with Drs. Robert McKelvey (emeritus, U. Montana) and Peter Golubtsov (Moscow State Lomonosov University, Russia) is able to explain the contrasting policy preferences of the small island nations in the region and the distant water fishing fleets that exploit the tuna resources. The work also sheds light on the effects of ENSO-related variability in the location of the fish stocks on policy effectiveness and on the distribution of income among the various coastal nations and fishing fleets.

Earlier Work on International Fisheries and Climate Variability

Dr. Miller’s, previous work in this area encompassed three separate projects that examined the impacts of climate variability on fish abundance and distribution and the implications of that variability for efforts to maintain effective cooperative international fisheries management.

Dr. Miller's Curriculum Vitae (file size: 265 KB).

Kathleen Miller
Climate Science and Applications Program
RAL/ National Center for Atmospheric Research
PO Box 3000 Boulder, Colorado USA 80307
Tel: 303-497-8115 Fax: 303-497-8401
Email: kathleen at ucar.edu