Future regional climate change was the final topic of this chapter and has a variety of implications for policymakers depending on the region of interest.  Warming is expected to occur across the board in the 21st century, but in certain areas (e.g., the Arctic, northern and eastern Asia) this warming is expected to exceed that of the global mean.  In North America, one of the most relevant points from the latest CMIP5 projections is lower confidence that the southwestern U.S. will experience a precipitation decrease, which has implications for water management issues in that region.  Elsewhere, heat wave intensity, duration, and frequency are very likely going to increase, especially in Europe where there already have been several bad heat waves in recent years.  Increases in precipitation extremes are another common theme across multiple regions, with the potential for more extreme flooding and drought events.  A particular case of interest is Amazonia, where regional warming is expected to be the highest and coincident with a significant decrease in rainfall during the dry season.  These changes have important implications for the Amazon rainforest, which is home to the largest collection of plant and animal species in the world but is already under threat from human activities such as logging.  Two of the worst droughts on record in the Amazon have occurred in the past 10 years (2005 and 2010).  Several studies have predicted that the rainforest is near a ‘tipping point’ beyond which the rainforest would transition to more of a savanna-type landscape, which would have enormous implications for global climate given the large carbon dioxide uptake from rainforest trees.  In a typical year, the Amazon absorbs 1.5 gigatons of carbon dioxide; in the drought year of 2010, the Amazon emitted a net of 5 gigatons of carbon dioxide (Lewis et al., 2011) – nearly equivalent to the total emissions of greenhouse gases through fossil fuel burning in the United States in a whole year.