Project News
Lisa Dilling Joins Center, Brings New Projects
Lisa Dilling recently joined the Center as a CIRES Visiting Fellow. Lisa, whose research focuses on the use of information in decision making related to climate and, in particular, the carbon cycle, brings the following projects to the Center:
Scales of Decision-Making and the Carbon Cycle will be the first step in understanding how decisions made in institutions at different scales currently act to affect carbon sequestration.
State of the Carbon Cycle Report is a broadly conceived activity “designed to provide accurate, unbiased, and policy-relevant scientific information concerning the carbon cycle to a broad range of stakeholders.” The two overarching objectives for the SOCCR are to summarize scientific knowledge about carbon cycle properties and changes; and to provide scientific information for decision support and policy formulation concerning carbon.
Communicating Urgency, Facilitating Social Change: New Strategies for Climate Change. The focus of this project is how to improve climate change communication in a way that helps facilitate individual and organizational/institutional change toward more environmentally sustainable behavior.
Lisa is also a key participant in the Center’s Carbon Cycle Science and Science Policy Assessment and Research on Climate projects.
Conversations with Presidential Science Advisors
On issues as diverse as stem cell research and aluminum tubes in Iraq, science has occupied the center of a number of highly visible debates in recent years. To gain perspective on the role of science in policy and politics at the highest levels of government, the CIRES Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado-Boulder is sponsoring a lecture series featuring the current and former presidential science advisors. The theme of the lecture series is “Policy, Politics, and Science in the White House: Conversations with Presidential Science Advisors.” Through this series we seek to document how science is used and perhaps sometimes misused in policy and politics. Using an interview format we will articulate the theme by discussing with each presidential science advisor a significant science policy issue or issues that arose during his tenure.
Participants are:
- Dr. John H. Marburger II (President George W. Bush 2001-present)
- Dr. Neal Lane (President Bill Clinton 1998-2001)
- Dr. John H. Gibbons (President Bill Clinton 1993-1998)
- Dr. D. Allan Bromley (President George H.W. Bush 1989-1993)
- Dr. George A. Keyworth II (President Ronald Reagan 1981-1986)
- Dr. Edward David (President Richard Nixon 1970-1973)
The series will run throughout calendar year 2005. Sponsors include the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado-Boulder Graduate School and Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research , University of Colorado-Boulder Provost's Office, University of Colorado-Boulder College of Engineering and Applied Science, University of Colorado-Boulder College of Arts and Sciences, Dean's Fund for Excellence, ICAT Managers, Inc., and Southwest Research Institute.
The Center’s Presidential Science Advisor’s website will be updated throughout the series.
Carbon Cycle Science Project
How might carbon cycle research under the US Global Change Research Program (i.e., the "supply" of carbon cycle science) more effectively and efficiently address the needs and capabilities of actual or potential decision makers who use carbon cycle science (i.e., the "demand" for carbon cycle science)?
In order to answer this question, we are mapping the production of carbon cycle science, from the needs of those who make decisions to the scientists and agencies that supply scientific information and then back to the decision makers who might use the information (“reconciling supply and demand"). Our goal is to contribute to the effectiveness of both carbon cycle research and decision making related to the carbon cycle.
On September 16-17, 2004 about 35 people convened for a workshop at the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory in Fort Collins, Colorado to discuss reconciliation of supply of and demand (RSD) for carbon cycle science. Participants included carbon cycle scientists, program managers, social and policy scientists, people who make decisions implicated by carbon cycle science, as well as a number of graduate students. The workshop focused on characterizing supply, understanding demand, and learning lessons from other areas of research where RSD has been an important component of science policy (e.g., seasonal climate forecasting). The workshop focused closely on three cases in which to explore RSD in some detail: agro-ecosystems, the urban setting, and an international case study focused on the Large-Scale Biosphere Atmosphere Program in the Amazon. Six background papers were commissioned for the workshop focused on the methods and literature of RSD, a big-picture characterization and history of carbon cycle science, and on each of the case studies.
A workshop report will be available soon and can be found at the Carbon Cycle project website.
Science Policy Assessment and Research on Climate
The Center’s new NSF project, Science Policy Assessment and Research on Climate (SPARC), is up and running. Please see our Center’s website for further details on SPARC. Our next issue of Ogmius will contain a focus on SPARC activities.
The Klamath Basin Project
Third year law student Anne Ruggles worked at the Center as an extern exploring the role of science and policy in the Klamath Basin. The culmination of her research can be found at the recently redesigned Klamath Basin Project website.
This website explains the physical, historical, legal, and stakeholder contexts in the Klamath, discusses the 2001 controversy and includes links to key reports, explores the link between science and policy, and provides information about several alternative solutions that have been proposed to resolve the controversy.
Hurricane risk pricing, catastrophe models, and data quality
Former ENVS graduate student Edouard von Herberstein undertook this project entitled “Hurricane risk pricing, catastrophe models, and data quality: Why it matters and what should be done about it?" to propose a method to assess the sensitivity of insurance pricing methods to data quality. He questions whether these pricing techniques efficiently use the information in hurricane loss models. His report can be found here. Edouard now works for Wellington in London.
