Conference: Scientists as Allies: Community-centered Approaches to Climate Resilience

American Geophysical Union, Washington DC

Investigators

Abstract

This project will organize and host a set of workshops to identify the parameters and sub-elements for a Convergence Accelerator track enhancing community resilience using citizen-science and community-science. The core of this effort is to engage society and scientists together to envision how best to links discoveries to solutions that matter for real communities’ resilience. This effort will bring scientists and non-scientists together, focusing especially on the needs and concerns of historically neglected or marginalized groups, to define community-science approaches that lead to a more just and sustainable future. The proposed track is expected to identify pilot efforts that can facilitate cultural and systemic change that can help the sciences be more inclusive, relevant, and responsive to community needs. These insights, if implemented in a track, could have transformative impacts on scientific engagement with communities – dramatically changing how scientists and scientific institutions engage and how the public views science. This multimodal workshop effort plans to include online ideation, inspirational micro-presentations, interactive virtual workshops, and in-person synthesis. A particular focus will be on building bridges between traditional scientific approaches and other ways of knowing more prevalent among non-scientists. Bringing these approaches together is expected to improve scientific literacy, build trust in science, and expand the conception of what counts as science. This effort will especially focus on communities that have been historically neglected or marginalized groups, ensuring that future community-science and citizen science efforts that develop from this workshop can also enhance equity and justice. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.