Want actionable climate knowledge at scale? Consider these three pathways

(Press-News.org) There's no one-size-fits-all solution to adapting and building resilience to climate change, but a new study led by the University of Michigan offers three generalized pathways to help climate knowledge achieve its maximum impact.

The researchers analyzed available literature and built on their own experiences to distill these separate but complementary pathways for creating new thinking that is not only actionable, but scalable. Published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the work was supported, in part, by federal funding from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

"We know climate change is happening and there's been this thrust to make science more responsive to real challenges in people's lives," said Derek Van Berkel, an associate professor in the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability, or SEAS. He is also one of 14 coauthors of the new study, which hints at a unifying theme of the pathways: You need to get a lot of people involved.

"We should let a thousand flowers bloom to make this knowledge more actionable," Van Berkel said. "We should be engaging with more people locally, then trying to scale up in multiple ways."

The three pathways: 

Increase and broaden participation in creating climate information, which can make it more actionable. Use online tools to support decision making that make the knowledge easier to understand and use.  Aggregate impact by getting buy-in and help from influential parties. To help illustrate these pathways in a more familiar setting, the team used the example of a potluck at work to celebrate a federal holiday, like Christmas. The fact that Christmas is designated as a federal holiday is an example of aggregated impact: The decision of government policymakers to observe the holiday influences employers to recognize it as well. 

A party planning committee could broaden impact by recruiting members from across departments and responsibilities to make sure the celebration appeals to as many people as possible. The committee could then diffuse information about the party using tools like e-vites to reach folks in the company who didn't help plan the event. And potlucks elicit a second broadening of participation through crowdsourcing food production to yield a diversity of dishes, flavors and cuisines for everyone to enjoy.

While this is a simple example, anyone who's coordinated a party knows it's no cakewalk. Still, the pathways are relatively straightforward and intuitive when you pause to think about them, and the same is true in the context of climate knowledge.

"The three pathways to scaling up climate knowledge impact present a useful, simplified way of understanding this work," said study coauthor Erica Goto, a research scientist at the Arizona Institute for Resilience at the University of Arizona. "Tackling a problem as complicated as climate knowledge impact can seem very conceptual and fuzzy, but we feel that these pathways allow us to anchor the conversation in more approachable concepts that are informed by academic research and practice."

As a real-world example of this, the team pointed to its work on a Gulf Coast project led by Maria Carmen Lemos, who is now a professor emerita with SEAS and also a senior author of the new report. Goto was a postdoctoral researcher with U-M and Great Lakes Integrated Sciences and Assessments, or GLISA, for the Gulf project, which was funded by the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine.

One of the goals of the project was to learn whether the team could adapt its FloodWise Communities tool, which itself was built using the three pathways, for the Gulf Coast. FloodWise Communities was created with broad participation from members of five Great Lakes cities to help leaders in other cities and communities assess their vulnerabilities to storm water.

To scale up the impact of the tool, demonstrating it could be deployed in a new environment was just one facet of the problem. The researchers also had to work with community members, city planners and other leaders to make sure the tool could be trusted to address the unique climate concerns of the Gulf Coast. Overcoming these challenges took perseverance and trial-and-error, but, ultimately, sticking to the pathways helped get everyone where they wanted to go. But what exactly that process looked like in the Gulf was necessarily distinct from what it had been in the Great Lakes.

"People might want to ask, 'What’s the recipe for a successful scaling up process?', and the unfortunate reality is that there is no guaranteed one-size-fits-all approach," said coauthor Lisa Maillard, a senior associate and Civic Science Fellow at Pew Charitable Trust. Maillard also worked on the Gulf Coast project while earning her doctorate at SEAS.

"Although we think these pathways are a great way to start thinking about how you might undertake this work, it is not necessarily linear and it will look very different in different contexts. This new article suggests some ingredients that may be helpful, but finding the right combination is up to you."

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