Ronald D. Brunner - US grants

In the aftermath of the Cold War, politicians and citizens call for more direct and immediate public benefits from public investments in research. A case in point is the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP), with its mandate to `combine and interpret data from various sources to produce information readily usable by policy makers attempting to formulate effective strategies for preventing, mitigating, and adapting to the effects of global climate change.` This project is a response to current difficulties in accessing the relevant literatures and communicating across specializations. The project will identify, develop, and integrate the accumulated concepts, theories and methods of the policy sciences and the broader policy movement in ways that will allow researchers, staff and administrators involved in global change research to use them to produce accessible information for practical policy purposes. Over the last half century, the policy sciences have contributed toward integrating ethics, science and policy. While policy specialists have not achieved concensus, the intellectual tools have survived decades of practice and peer review and converged on a common outlook that is contextual, problem-oriented, and multi-method. Its methods involve translation among functional equivalents in the specialized vocabularies of the disciplines; historical, case, and comparative methods; and the methods of applied ethics. Using these concepts and methods, the principal investigator will develop a book and presentations and articles that will assist a wide variety of specialists and lay persons with research and policy mandates concerning global change to address practical policy issues.

Climate in northern regions is expected to change dramatically in the coming decades. Climate research has developed tools to predict long-range change and to evaluate the uncertainty in these predictions. It is possible that these research products could potentially play a role in regional and local decision making. However, communities may have alternate approches to dealing with climate events and climate change, approaches that may not link to predicitive research products. This Small Grant for Exploratory Research would conduct interviews and small conferences with residents of the Alaskan North Slope communities. These gatherings will be used (1) to evaluate the understanding by individuals within these communities about climate events, (2) to determine what policies or actions they take to adapt to or mitigate climate events, and (3) to examine whether their culture institutions can incorporate predictive research products.

The research project examines ways to utilize climate information gained by the scientific community in conjunction with the traditional knowledge held by people native to the Arctic as a determinate for making decisions in response to changing climate conditions in the far north. A range of scenarios for changing climate conditions such as decreased sea ice, changing frequency of extreme weather events, storm surges, and other environmental factors will be used to predict the probability of variable environmental conditions that could lead to decisions in the local communities about management of resources, marine transportation options, and coastal construction. Local stakeholder groups will be used to identify how socioeconomic decision-making might be done in response to various probabilities for changing climate on a variety of time scales. An interdisciplinary education project will integrate natural and social sciences with specific application to arctic climate and socioeconomic issues. The project will contribute to the Human dimensions of the Arctic system (HARC) initiative of the Arctic System Science Program.