Systems of Integrated Research, Assessment, and Decision Support for Global Environmental Change

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

After more than a decade of active, coordinated effort, researchers from a diverse set of disciplines as well as private-, semi-private-, and public-sector officials seeking to obtain insights regarding how to deal with global environmental change have begun examining the relative efficacy of different research approaches and strategies. This project seeks to design and evaluate strategies with which the next generation of national and international global environmental change programs might more effectively integrate and support its research, assessment and decision-support activities. In particular, an interdisciplinary team of investigators intends to catalyze and contribute to three interrelated lines of work: (1) Broadening the global change agenda to engage more directly the agenda of the other big new environmental idea of the last twenty years: sustainability. The team's goal is to promote a reframing of the global change agenda in terms that will help to keep its research broadly but strategically engaged with a wide range of the world's most pressing development challenges. (2) Developing a place-based, integrated understanding of global change effects and vulnerabilities. The team's goal is to combine natural and social science perspectives to develop and test common conceptual frameworks and analytic approaches for the integrated regional study of multiple, cumulative, interactive stress effects and multiple time scale responses related to global change. (3) Designing, supporting, and managing systems that can better integrate research, assessment and decision support activities on problems of global change. The team's goal is to evaluate alternative models for such integration, with special emphasis on the trade-offs and tensions between centralized and distributed systems, stability versus adaptability of design, curiosity-driven versus problem-driven priority setting, and governmental versus nongovernmental and hybrid institutional settings. The investigators will contribute to the evolution of strategies for meeting these challenges through an international collaboration among a small set of leading scholars and program managers involved in the production, assessment, and application of knowledge relating to global change. These include natural scientists, social scientists, and policy analysts as well as individuals from several countries with substantial experience in running or advising research and assessment programs. Using a group of collaborators and shared postdoctoral students supported through the project, the team will conduct research on each of the main themes noted above providing a series of critical reviews and state of the science papers. Work in progress will be reviewed at a monthly electronic colloquium, which will experiment with different approaches for bringing together program principals and invited guests in an intense, collaborative, and cumulative dialog without requiring extensive travel for all participants. In addition, ad hoc workshops and an extended summer study will be used to assure interaction and integration across program components. Products of this project, including reviews, papers, work in progress and summaries of the colloquium sessions, will be posted on an open-forum web site to encourage and facilitate a wider discussion of the program's issues. This project is jointly supported by NSF and by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).