When
DATE: Wednesday, April 2, 2014
TIME: 3:00-4:00 pm
LOCATION: Marley Building, Room 230
SPEAKER: Alison Meadow (Southwest Climate Science Center) .
Alison Meadow joined the Institute in 2012 as the Program Manager for the Southwest Climate Science Center. The SWCSC is a partnership between the Department of the Interior and six southwest universities to provide climate science directly to resource managers and decision makers in the Southwest.
Prior to joining the Institute, Alison was an assistant research scientist in the department of Soil, Water, and Environmental Science at UA. She continues her affiliation with SWES through a project to collaborate with American Indian tribes in northeastern Arizona to improve drought monitoring and planning in the Four Corners region.
Alison has a background in Environmental Anthropology and her research has included the impact of local food system development and adaptation to climate change in the arctic. Alison?s previous work experience includes research on improving educational outcomes for Alaska Native students in Fairbanks, AK, evaluation of education programs, as well as assessing and planning for urban green space in Tucson, AZ.
ABSTRACT:
Co-production of science knowledge appears to be a more successful model of integrating science into resource management decisions than the ?loading-dock? model. The loading-dock model of science - wherein new scientific information is created solely by scientists and then delivered to end-users - has proven ineffective when dealing with ?wicked problems? like climate change adaptation. Instead, researchers have suggested that the process of scientists and policy or decision makers working together to develop the science necessary for management decisions makes that science more usable and more likely to be used. However, few evaluations have been undertaken that can point to specific outcomes for either resource management or science decisions after engaging in a collaborative process like co-production. This talk will provide an overview of and some preliminary findings from a study to evaluate how new climate knowledge is (or isn?t) being co-produced through the Southwest Climate Science Center and how we propose to evaluate the resource management and science outcomes from the process of co-production of knowledge.