Informing Decisions in a Changing Climate (2009) / Chapter Skim
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5 A National Initiative for Decision Support
5 A National Initiative for Decision Support
Pages 125-138
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From page 125... ...
Decision support poses major challenges to decision makers and social institutions. The challenges include developing new approaches to communication between scientists and decision makers, adopting new ways of thinking and planning to incorporate longer time horizons and the major uncertainties of climate change, evolving new modes of social learning, and developing previously underdeveloped areas of science.
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From page 126... ...
It is useful to think of those needing climate-related decision support as constituencies -- collections of decision makers that may be defined by the kinds of climate-related hazards or opportunities they face, the kinds of climate-affected decisions they must make, shared legal or regulatory mandates, a regional location, or the fact that they are already organized as a constituency. Focusing decision support efforts on constituencies is an effective way to organize them around users' needs.
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From page 127... ...
But an analytic-deliberative approach to decision making and learning, which integrates scientific information into a broadly participatory and iterative process of appraisal and reconsideration, is usually best suited to the kind of decision environment that is typical in responding to climate change: one characterized by changing physical conditions, changing information, and multiple participants with different and sometimes changing objectives. THE FEDERAL ROLE IN DECISION SUPPORT It is important to emphasize that in developing new structures and institutions for decision support, the federal government plays an important but not exclusive role.
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From page 128... ...
A NATIONAL INITIATIVE Federal efforts to provide and promote climate-related decision support should be coordinated within a new integrated, interagency initiative. All the recommendations for federal action described in the previous chapters can be implemented in an integrated fashion under the umbrella of the initiative, as described below.
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From page 129... ...
. The national initiative and participating agencies can develop the national capacity to identify climate-sensitive constituencies and interact with them by providing human resources, funds, professional training and education, and leadership in federal environmental and climate agencies, encouraging a systematic perspective, and in some instances establishing mandates to use climate-relevant information.
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From page 130... ...
The Research Element in the National Initiative The research element of the national initiative should develop the science of climate response with two foci: research for decision support, aimed at providing decision-relevant knowledge and information; and research on decision support, aimed at making decision support activities and associated decision processes more effective, efficient, and capable of learning. A major new scientific research effort is needed to better inform responses to climate change.
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From page 131... ...
Achieving the objectives of the research focus on decision support will require investments in monitoring and evaluation of decision support activities, processes, and products and the institutional resources and infrastructure to support analysis, deliberation, and iterative learning. To achieve these objectives, the national initiative should include support for a clearinghouse function -- either a formal organization or a set of distributed organizations and activities (e.g., research centers, websites, interactive databases, Wikis)
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From page 132... ...
They also identify an important new federal responsibility -- to facilitate distributed responses to climate change -- that has no obvious agency home. And they call for significant changes in the nation's research program related to climate change, including the development of scientific fields that have received little support in the past, that have not recently been mission priorities of any federal agency, and that the agencies are ill prepared to develop.
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From page 133... ...
New Tasks It makes sense to organize the decision support efforts for particular constituencies in the agencies that serve those constituencies, as is done by the NOAA Sectoral Applications Research Program for coastal and water managers. But, in many cases, the most obvious agencies do not consider such decision support activities as part of their missions and lack offices and personnel with the responsibilities and expertise needed to manage the research.
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From page 134... ...
However, its advice on ways to expand fundamental knowledge to inform decision making is consistent with our recommendations for the research element of the national decision support initiative. Together, the two reports call for significant change in research activities being conducted under the authority of the USGCRA, including developing underdeveloped areas of research and finding appropriate organizational homes in the federal research program for research areas that do not now have them.
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From page 135... ...
to allocate needed funds to the relevant agencies. Because some of the new tasks entail change in agencies' traditional missions, effective leadership by the new White House coordinator of energy and climate policy will be needed to ensure that any distributed funds are used for the national initiative.
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From page 136... ...
Moreover, we believe the lesson from past experience is that research and service functions both do better when they collaborate than when they proceed separately. One concept of a national climate service is that a new organizational entity would be created in NOAA, modeled on the Weather Service, that would transform data from climate models into decision support products intended for use by various kinds of decision makers and would disseminate that information publicly.
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From page 137... ...
In addition, this model of a climate service is focused only on providing information about climate: It would therefore fail to develop and provide the many kinds of nonclimate information that climate-affected decision makers also need. If a national climate service is created, we believe it should follow a much more user-driven and interagency organizational model, be closely linked to the research program, and have a purview that goes beyond developing and providing information about climate. We also believe that in addition to any new organizational entity, such as a climate service, individual federal agencies should develop efforts to provide decision support for their climate-affected constituencies.
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