This award provides support for a two-day workshop that will gather a select group of experts from the academic, private and government sectors in global change sciences, including the physical and biological sciences: Physics and Dynamics of Climate Variability and Change, Land Cover and Land Use Change, Ecological and Biogeochemical Change, Biodiversity and Global Change; and the human dimensions of global change: Economics of Climate Change, Environmental Law, Policy and Governance, Education, Communication and Public Engagement, and Decision-Making and Other Stakeholders? Issues. The workshop goals are to explore options for how to structure the national research program on global change to (1) be more effectively organized around integrated scientific-societal issues to facilitate crosscutting research focused on understanding the interactions among the climate, human, and environmental systems and on supporting societal responses to climate change; and (2) balance activities in fundamental, use-inspired research that contributes to both improved understanding and more effective decision-making, climate services, climate change assessment, and adaptation research. The program structure must facilitate meeting the end-to-end needs of the nation to face the challenges of profound environmental change ? from basic research and integrated observations through multi-disciplinary applications to socioeconomic and ecosystem adaptation and mitigation actions.
This workshop will explore the challenges of both continuing progress in addressing fundamental research questions and providing information that is increasingly useful and relevant to decision-making on matters complicated by considerations of climate and global change. The workshop also will explore ways to map the interdisciplinary findings and tools that global change research currently has available and can be expected to develop over the next decade onto the societal needs for coping with the difficulties and/or taking best advantage of the opportunities that global change inevitably will create. Underpinning this mapping are the social sciences that can provide the context of economics, governance, and communication that helps translate research results to the general public and decision-makers.
Intellectual Merit: Bringing together the basic research community and the community of stakeholders who have some risk exposure to climate and global change has been a challenge for the past 20 years of global change research in the U.S. This workshop will consider structural architectures for a national program that can support intellectual inquiry in the areas of climate science, adaptation research, and technology development for the mitigation of negative impacts of climate change. The workshop has the potential to define new ways of integration and collaboration among the diverse research disciplines, thereby transforming the conduct of climate change research in the nation.
Broader Impacts: The workshop discussion can inform the Federal government as it prepares for a new era of global change research, and state and local governments seeking answers to pressing questions about how global change affects their regions. The greater integration of basic research, applied research, climate services and decision-support has the potential to open new pathways of communication between the academic world and the private and government sectors as they all prepare for a changing planet.
A Workshop to Frame Global Change Research Planning was held on 13-14 September 2010 at George Mason University, with sponsorship by the National Science Foundation. All information about the workshop has been posted to a web page: http://gcworkshop.cos.gmu.edu/ including a prospectus for the workshop, the agenda, lists of the planning committee and participants, and reference materials. This community gathering of experts in global change sciences explored options for how to structure a national research program on global change that both: stresses basic science and applied science, and has "end to end" capacity. The background for the meeting was provided by recent reports from the National Research Council calling for a reorganization of the U.S. Global Change Research Program, and several presentations that described the recent past and current status of strategic planning activities. In particular, Shere Abbott (Associate Director for Environment, Office of Science and Technology Policy) shared new vision and mission statements: Vision: "… A nation, globally engaged and guided by science, meeting the challenges of climate and global change." Mission: "… to build a knowledge base that informs human responses to climate and global change through coordinated and integrated federal programs of research, education, communication, and decision support." Invited participants included a wide range of experts on global change research, including the physical and biological sciences and the human dimensions of global change, from the Federal government, the academic research community and stakeholders in both the public domain and the private sector. The main outcome of the workshop was a set of findings and counsels on basic and user-inspired research, the strategic planning process, the end-to-end approach, and communication, including the following: Strategic planning for the national program in global change research should be open, transparent and inclusive of representatives of the research and stakeholder communities. The next generation global change research strategic plan needs to identify specific approaches for fostering a closer connection between fundamental research and user needs; it needs to identify specific mechanisms for improving budgetary coordination; and it needs to address known deficiencies in infrastructure, observations, data management, and modeling. The existing federal program is very large with a lot of inertia. The individual agencies are not configured to deal with emerging priorities such as providing accurate and reliable projections of regional climate and likely impacts; assessing response options, and engaging stakeholders. Consistent with the recommendation of the America’s Climate Choices report, a planning structure is needed that would identify major components for which the Federal research program develops and communicates integrative, user-inspired knowledge. These components include: Observing, understanding and predicting integrated systems Improving knowledge for limiting global change and the consequences of human actions Improving knowledge for adapting to global change impacts Improving knowledge for informing and interacting with decision-makers and stakeholders effecting and affected by global change Research can be inspired by considerations of use and/or advancing fundamental scientific understanding. Prioritized research can and should address both objectives simultaneously as well as serve to address operations and services. Interactions among researchers and stakeholders will lead to a plan that is larger in scope than the federal strategic plan. This larger plan, a national plan, would include input, buy-in and review by the federal agencies, the scientific community, state and regional resource and disaster managers, the business community, non-governmental organizations and other networks of relevant stakeholders. Integrated, "trans-disciplinary" research teams are needed that are less tightly aligned within traditional disciplinary and more solution-oriented. The delivery of products that employ insights from use-inspired and fundamental research may be a new activity for the climate research community, requiring new roles and new job descriptions. The way in which questions are framed is critical. Use- and user-inspired questions will ensure that the information produced meets user needs; engagement of the research community will ensure that fundamental science insights and questions are incorporated and addressed. Communicating has become as important as discovering. Decision scientists and other relevant social and behavioral scientists should be engaged to a much greater extent both to conduct climate change communication research, and to collaborate with climate scientists and professional communicators in improving the communication effectiveness of climate change findings and educational materials. Improvements in conveyance of level of confidence and uncertainties must be a priority. Advice and accountability are required elements of a structural plan. Accountability requires periodic review including a broad range of stakeholders as part of the process. The program should explore establishing a user advisory council or other mechanism for ensuring accountability to users. Planning must accommodate the dynamic, evolving and diverse decision-making processes employed by different decision-making communities – include thinking about appropriate time scale, decision framework, and cross sector interactions. The outcomes of the workshop should not be viewed as comprehensively representative of the views of the broad research and stakeholder communities.
