Lisa Dilling University of Colorado Campus Box 397 Boulder, CO 80309-0397 Tel: 303-735-3678 Fax: 303-735-1576 ldilling@colorado.edu

 

Lisa Dilling is Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES) and a member of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder. She is PI and Director of the Western Water Assessment, a NOAA Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessment project that studies and facilitates the use of climate information in decision making in the Intermountain West. Her scholarship focuses on decision making, the use of information and science policy. Her research topics include drought and urban water management, climate adaptation in cities and on public lands, carbon management, and geoengineering governance.  She is the author of over 40 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters, co-editor of the book, Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change, Facilitating Social Change and was Co-leader and co-author of the State of the Carbon Cycle Synthesis and Assessment Product 2.2 for the U.S. Global Change Research Program. She was the recipient of a 2016 Leverhulme Visiting Professorship hosted by Oxford University, UK. She holds a PhD in biology from the University of California Santa Barbara and a BA in biology from Harvard University.

Highlighted Publications

• The Critical Role of Communities of Practice and Peer Learning in Scaling Hydroclimatic Information Adoption
• Is adaptation success a flawed concept?
• Savior of Rural Landscapes or Solomon's Choice? Colorado's Experiment with Alternative Transfer Methods for Water (ATMs)
• Testing the Potential of Multiobjective Evolutionary Algorithms (MOEAs) with Colorado Water Managers
• Drought in Urban Water Systems: Learning Lessons for Climate Adaptive Capacity
• Regional Climate Response Collaboratives: Multi-Institutional Support for Climate Resilience
• Making Research More Usable at CU Boulder
• Learning to Expect Surprise: Hurricanes Harvey, Irma, Maria, and Beyond
• Making Sense of Climate Engineering: A Focus Group Study of Lay Publics in Four Countries
• Drivers of adaptation: Responses to weather- and climate-related hazards in 60 local governments in the Intermountain Western U.S.
• Participatory Framework for Assessment and Improvement of Tools (ParFAIT): Increasing the impact and relevance of water management decision support research
• Climate in Context: Science and Society Partnering for Adaptation (coauthored chapters)
• Managing Carbon on Federal Public Lands: Opportunities and Challenges in Southwestern Colorado
• The Role of U.S. States in Facilitating Effective Water Governance Under Stress and Change
• Adaptation, Invited Contribution to Research Handbook on Climate Governance
• The Colorado Basin River Forecast Center and the Decision Making Process
• Community Involvement Critical to Adaptation, Managing Climate Change Risks
• The dynamics of vulnerability: Why adapting to climate variability will not always prepare us for climate change
• What Stakeholder Needs Tell Us about Enabling Adaptive Capacity: The Intersection of Context and Information Provision across Regions in the United States
• Unpacking the 'information barrier': Comparing perspectives on information as a barrier to climate change adaptation in the interior mountain West
• What Do Stakeholders Need to Manage for Climate Change and Variability?
• Governing Geoengineering Research: Why, When and How?
• Promoting Adaptation Success in Natural Resource Management Through Decision Support: Lessons from the Great Plains and Rocky Mountain Regions
• Opportunities and Challenges for Carbon Management on U.S. Public Lands
• Managing carbon in a multiple use world: The implications of land-use decision context for carbon management
• Climate Change and Western Public Lands: A Survey of U.S. Federal Land Managers on the Status of Adaptation Efforts
• Managing United States Public Lands in Response to Climate Change: A View From the Ground Up
• Improving Societal Outcomes of Extreme Weather in a Changing Climate: An Integrated Perspective
• Communicating Climate Change: Closing the Science-Action Gap
• A U.S. Carbon Cycle Science Plan
• Creating Usable Science: Opportunities and Constraints for Climate Knowledge Use and their Implications for Science Policy
• Geoengineering, Ocean Fertilization, and the Problem of Permissible Pollution
• Carbon stewardship: Land management decisions and the potential for carbon sequestration in Colorado
• Equity in forecasting climate: Can science save the world's poor
• Towards science in support of decision making: Characterizing the supply of carbon cycle science
• The opportunities and responsibility for carbon cycle science in the U.S.
• Toward carbon governance: Challenges across scales in the United States (Contact Lisa Dilling for a pdf reprint)
• Creating a Climate for Change: Communicating Climate Change-Facilitating Social Change

View all of Lisa's publications

A Note for Prospective Graduate Students

If you are considering applying to the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado and would like to work with me, please send an email with these three attachments:

1. A C.V.
2. A statement describing your research interests
3. A description of why you’d like to enroll in the Environmental Studies program, and work in my research group

Please note: Lisa Dilling is not accepting new graduate students in 2019