Climate Change - Impacts According to the US Environmental Protection Agency's Global Change Program, Kentucky and the rest of the Southeastern Region are likely to experience:   Increases in air and water temperatures that will cause heat-related stresses for people, plants, and animals. Effects of increased heat include more heat-related illness; declines in forest growth and agricultural crop production due to the combined effects of heat stress and declining soil moisture; declines in cattle production; increased buckling of pavement and railways; and reduced oxygen levels in streams and lakes, leading to fish kills and declines in aquatic species diversity.  Decreased water availability is very likely to affect the region’s economy as well as its natural systems. Increasing temperatures and longer periods between rainfall events coupled with increased demand for water will result in decreased water availability. (The 2007 water shortage in the Atlanta area is an example.) For information on climate change impacts in the Southeastern US click here. For information on climate change impacts at the national and international levels, see: Climate Change Science Compendium 2009, a United Nations Environment Program report reviewing some 400 major peer-reviewed scientific papers in the last three years that add to understanding of the impacts of climate change. The Compendium includes findings from new technologies that enhance knowledge of Earth's Systems. It suggests "the pace and scale of climate change may now be outstripping even the most sobering predictions of the last report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). [And] the newly emerging science points to some events thought likely to occur in longer-term time horizons, as already happening or set to happen far sooner than had previously been thought." Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Environmental Protection Agency Global Change Program National Research Council, Climate Change Science: An Analysis of Some Key Questions (2001) Center for Health and the Global Environment, Climate Change Futures: Health, Ecological, and Economic Dimensions, Harvard Medical School, November 2005