Paul Reinke to Lead and Expand Abt Associates' Climate Change Practice

Paul Reinke has joined Abt Associates to coordinate and expand the climate change services provided by the company's Environment and Resource Division. According to Reinke, climate change is a game changer. "The things we depend on — weather patterns, seasonal rhythms, annual rainfall, average temperature, start and end of storm seasons, and so on — will change in the coming decades. We use historical knowledge of the natural world to understand what the weather in coming years will be like; when changes in climate make that information increasingly irrelevant, our ability to anticipate long-term needs and concerns will be severely impaired."

Paul, who was previously at a not-for-profit think tank managing its climate change and energy lines of business, believes that Abt Associates is uniquely positioned to answer the questions that senators and other elected officials have asked him about global climate changes: "How will it affect us?" "What are the impacts and what can we do about them?" "What will it cost us?"

Because of Abt Associates' historical focus on evaluation research and its staff expert in a wide range of relevant areas, particularly cost analysis, the company can provide concrete answers to questions like these. Paul sees climate change as a unifying theme for many of the practices at Abt Associates especially because the extreme complexity of the problem means that it calls for a cross-disciplinary toolkit of responses.

Paul sees energy, environment and climate change as inextricably related. "It's shortsighted to tackle one challenge without considering the consequences in other areas. For example, energy independence is a laudable and necessary goal, yet our most abundant energy resource — coal — is not environmentally benign to obtain and process. Nor is its emission reducing the volume of greenhouse gas pumped into the atmosphere and oceans. The solutions we embrace must address all of our problems equitably. This is what Abt Associates does extremely well."

Among the agencies Paul foresees Abt Associates working with on climate change are the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Department of Defense (DoD). "Abt Associates has a longstanding relationship with the EPA, supporting a variety of programs embedded in aspects of climate change. We've provided technical expertise in water infrastructure, water resource management, greenhouse gas management and air quality, and in natural resource and ecosystem sustainment, to help EPA understand the impact of climate change on our physical environment. Our support of EPA's efforts to understand the economic and social impacts of climate change has included determining the effects of temperature changes on human health, the relationship between climate change and energy policy, and the likely costs of greenhouse gas regulation for energy-intensive economic sectors."

For the DoD, Paul sees Abt Associates' expertise and knowledge as making a critical contribution: "DoD is the Nation's largest single consumer of energy resources. Because it uses so much energy to perform its missions, DoD is increasingly concerned not only with the cost of fuel but also with the likely regulation of energy emissions in the coming years. And the Department is custodian for vast amounts of land withdrawn from the public domain. DoD's ability to act as an effective steward of these lands may be affected dramatically by long-term climate change." Abt is targeting these agencies to expand their ability to make a difference — "We want to take our models, our tools, our staff knowledge and apply these strengths to the problems our country will face in the near and long term."

Throughout his 20 year consulting career in Washington D.C., Paul has supported many different defense and civilian agencies, including among others the Departments of Energy and Defense, the General Accounting Office, the Environmental Protection Agency, and National Institutes of Health. He has a Master of Arts in Russian History from the University of Illinois and a Bachelor of Arts in History and Economics from the University of Wisconsin.