Framework for translating science into local action
Earth Institute at Columbia University
As climate change proceeds, businesses and communities are wondering how to adapt and prepare. However, they’re finding it’s not always easy to translate broad-scale climate science into local solutions, or even to figure out which data to rely on and how to apply it.
That’s why a federal advisory committee appointed by President Obama started meeting in 2016 to explore how to make the National Climate Assessment (NCA) more usable for communities who want to take action. President Trump dismissed the panel in 2017. But with support from the Earth Institute at Columbia University, New York State and the American Meteorological Society, the committee reconvened as the Independent Advisory Committee on Applied Climate Assessment. Today, the committee’s findings and recommendations are published in Weather, Climate and Society, a journal of the American Meteorological Society.
The report calls for the creation of a new network to provide guidance to state, local, and tribal governments on how to use the NCA and other sources of science to get things done in their communities. This network, launched today as the Science to Climate Action Network (SCAN), is independent of the federal government and comprised of experts from civil society and state, local, and tribal settings. By providing hubs for businesses, communities and academics to work together on practical challenges, the network is designed to produce guidance for using science to update infrastructure and building codes, reduce wildfire risk, manage flooding, cut carbon emissions and more.
“The point is to take what we know, make it usable for the communities, and increase their confidence in weighing the tradeoffs and opportunities that come with different strategies for adaptation and mitigation,” said Richard Moss, a visiting senior research scientist at Columbia’s Earth Institute and chairman of the Independent Advisory Committee.
Daniel Zarrilli, New York City’s chief climate policy advisor, said such a collaboration is needed. “We live in an era of climate change and yet many of our systems, codes and standards have not caught up. Integrating climate science into everyday decisions is not just smart planning, it’s an urgent necessity,” he said. Zarilli noted that New York City has its own climate science panel, but most cities don’t have the same resources.
While partnerships to apply climate science in specific cities and communities have already started to take form, Moss said the Science to Climate Action Network will bring projects working on similar challenges together to share ideas, evaluate best practices, develop authoritative data, and then share this information on a national scale.
The consortium would help communities evaluate which climate datasets to rely on for specific decisions and actions. It would focus on practical challenges such as improving engineering designs to be more resilient and establishing new methods to assess returns on investment and weigh the costs and benefits of different strategies. In the long term, said Moss, the knowledge developed could inform the training and certification of professionals who specialize in applying climate science to support decision-making.
The Independent Advisory Committee is not the first to suggest such a consortium, but the new report is “much more specific about how to do this than in the past,” said Moss. “Many of the ideas come from decision-makers, community-based organizations, and climate experts who help users apply knowledge. We’re trying to produce something that adds value for those on the front lines of preparing their communities for climate change.”
The Science to Climate Action Network has already started collaborating with a number of regional research networks, university groups and organizations such as U.S. Climate Alliance and the Urban Sustainability Directors Network. Moss says the consortium’s next steps will be to engage additional partners, attract funding and decide which projects to tackle first. “We want to get started right away. With climate impacts becoming more problematic and efforts to limit climate change falling further behind, we can’t afford to wait,” he said.
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Backlinks: https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/01/03/national-climate-assessment-advisory-committee/ https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/05/01/international-advisory-committee-meeting/ https://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2018/12/14/national-climate-assessment-adaptation/
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US Government tried this 4 decades ago along with the (then minor) invasion of the whirlybirds. It was called “Technology Transfer.” Problem was that they didn’t have proper technology to transfer, just wanted control, same as judges making law, umpires changing rules, scientists making policy. Nowadays competence seems inversely correlated with the length of your title. In psychology it’s called something like displacement activity, common human trait when you don’t know what to do.
“… a house in New York City’s Breezy Point neighborhood… was battered by Hurricane Sandy”
A house at Breezy Point was damaged in a hurricane? How could have anybody have seen that coming?
That reminds me of the 2013 climate-change blindsiding in Alberta’s town of High River, when homes built on the flood plain were…
In other words they are struggling to find something caused by global warming that actually needs immediate fixing. There’s nothing worse than having a solution but no problem.
Activists = people with nothing to do believing they are making a change for the better. All you need to do is seed their brains with any idea that gives them moral authority and they’re off and running. They’re always right and anyone that questions them is wrong. Useful idiots.
Notwithstanding the probable waste of money in raising these houses in response to predicted Climate Change, at least they are tackling the supposed risks locally. Much better than imposing carbon taxes on everyone in the country.
Sounds like religious zealots are flushing scarce college funds down the drain.
They feed you with Climate Change Virtue Credits (CCVC). You feed them with dollars ($$$). All that matters is the exchange rate and daily volume. Additional words unnecessary, it’s all just numbers.
“…Here, a house in New York City’s Breezy Point neighborhood, which was battered by Hurricane Sandy, is being raised out of harm’s way as part of a city initiative…”
So it won’t be battered if a repeat of Sandy takes place?
The fact that they somehow amazingly found the money to continue work after being disbanded tells you that they should never have been funded by the government in the first place.