Climate change translates into change for the way governments, companies, and citizens conduct their daily business.
If society begins to adapt to change without an overarching framework to decide which changes are most damaging and what can be tolerated, resources could be squandered and the impacts of climate change exacerbated. A dynamic national tally of natural capital and assets, including associated ecosystem services, promises to serve as an ideal framework to design national, regional, individual, and private-sector responses to climate change. Unfortunately, the scientific and data-oriented foundation to report trends in ecosystem service provision and value is currently lacking (PCAST 2011). Therefore, now is the time for the nation to build a monitoring and reporting system for ecosystem services. Readers of this journal and scientists from many other disciplines will need to be the primary authors of such a system. These stakeholders must conduct the relevant analyses, translate scientific results in ways that are useful to public and private managers, and help draft the architecture of a real-time information database if climate-change adaptation in the US is to be welfare-enhancing and efficient