by Abigail Ahlert, Science Writing Intern

The House of Representatives is getting a bad reputation when it comes to science. But there are a few Representatives—11 out of 435, to be exact—that are formally pushing for broader awareness and funding of Earth and space science. Congressman Jared Polis (D-CO-2) and Congressman David Jolly (R-FL-13) are Co-Chairs of the new House Earth and Space Science Caucus. The caucus launched on September 14, 2016 with a reception in the Rayburn House Office Building. Current members include:

Donald Beyer (D-VA-08)
Michael Capuano (D-MA-07)
Judy Chu (D-CA-27)
Mike Honda (D-CA-17)
Grace Napolitano (D-CA-32)
Ed Perlmutter (D-CO-07)
Mark Pocan (D-WI-02)
Scott Tipton (R-CO-03)
Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ-12)

When asked about his motivation for chairing the caucus, Congressman Polis said, “In the 2^1st century, it’s crucial to continue to broaden awareness and align policy with Earth and space sciences. The House Earth and Space Sciences Caucus will focus on placing scientific research and evidence in the forefront of congressional and national discussions, while also continuing to support ideas that will promote STEM education programs for the next generation.  I’m honored to be the Democratic Co-Chair and look forward to the accomplishments we’ll achieve.”

The caucus alliance is chaired by the American Geophysical Union (AGU), a non-profit scientific association with more than 62,000 members, which will also serve as the primary congressional contact. AGU has participated in caucuses before, such as the Hazards Caucus Alliance, but intends to play a more involved role in the House Earth and Space Science Caucus. AGU expects that chairing the caucus alliance will provide a more concerted community effort and greater participation in the events that they typically host on the Hill.

I asked Brittany Webster, Public Affairs Specialist at AGU, how the organization got involved with the House Earth and Space Science Caucus in the first place. She said, “In 2015, the House of Representatives had an authorizing and appropriations bill that included language that sought to deprioritize the geosciences. AGU and other organizations through education and advocacy efforts was able to get that language struck from legislation that eventually became law.” Building upon the momentum of these efforts, AGU and partnering organizations chose to form a caucus in the House of Representatives. They reached out to Congressmen Polis and Jolly to act as the chairs, whom Webster referred to as “champions of the geosciences’’.

In the 115th Congress (January 2017 through January 2019), the House Earth and Space Caucus aims to host quarterly events, starting with an “Earth and Space Science 101” briefing in the first 101 days of Congress and an additional briefing on a specific policy topic. They also hope to organize an exhibition highlighting public and private sector partners to demonstrate how Earth and space science addresses national needs. Finally, the caucus is planning an interactive field trip for Congressional staffers to visit a lab or center related to Earth and space science. All proposed events will be discussed and finalized in 2017.

AGU is currently looking for organizations to join the House Earth and Space Science Caucus alliance. For more information on how to get involved, contact Brittany Webster.

by Beth Osnes
Inside the Greenhouse and Theatre & Dance Department, CU Boulder

I’m on the RTD Skyride bus coming home to Boulder and, like every time I come home to Colorado, I am blown away by the majesty and beauty of this place. I feel gratitude to live where I can watch the sun set over plates of the earth’s crust jutting out into the sky. I’m coming home from the Imagining America Conference (#ImaginingAmerica) for publically engaged scholarship in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Reflecting on that experience while looking at that big sky over the Rocky Mountains, I feel a kind of rising of my own yearning to collide what I gained from this gathering with the work I am privileged to do with Inside the Greenhouse (@ITG_Boulder), an initiative on the CU campus for creative climate communication. How can we make our students’ creative artifacts jut out farther into the public conversation? How can we engage our students more thoroughly into the exceptional landscape of our natural environment and the expanse of the public conversation surrounding climate issues? At Imagining America I feel like I gained some great ideas for rejuvenating our work and describing our aims with even more urgency and purpose.

One of my favorite sessions of the conference (and the one that had the most direct relevance to the work I do) was entitled “Our Changing Climate” (#ourchangingclimate) and was presented by N. Claire Napawan, Sheryl-Ann Simpson, and Brett Snyder, all professors at UC Davis. They presented on a participatory environmental design project that engages San Francisco Bay Area communities with issues of climate change by integrating youth perspectives with social media. At one point we were sent out in groups to explore aspects of community resilience we spotted on the campus of UW Milwaukee. I loved their approach to participatory urbanism that engages non-designers in thinking about the design for their city. Their focus on engaging youth voices in city resilience planning is related to my work using performance towards the same aim.

Night has fallen in the fifty minutes it took to get from the airport to Boulder. I can’t see our mountains anymore, but I know they are there. Although each of us from Imaging America has returned to our respective homes, we hold the knowledge that we are part of a vibrant community of artists, designers, and publicly engaged scholars rejuvenated in imagining what America can be and how our roles in higher education can give expression to that dream. The bus driver just called my stop. Chances are I’ll make it home in time for dinner.

How do science and technology affect policymaking? How does policymaking affect science and technology?

by Abigail Ahlert, Science Writing Intern

For the past 12 years, the Graduate Certificate in Science and Technology Policy program has been helping people explore these questions and more. The goal of the program is to prepare graduate students for careers at the interface of science, technology, and decision making. Certificate program students strive to understand the broad societal context of science and technology, as well as gain insight to the methodologies of policy analysis. The program has graduated 27 students and has 27 currently enrolled. Courses that satisfy the program’s 18-credit requirement span environmental science, economics, law and philosophy.

Recently, an informal survey of current and former students was conducted to gauge satisfaction with the certificate program. The survey spans the perspectives of students who have participated in the program as early as 2004 and as recently as this year. One wrote, “While I have only completed one core and one elective course so far, I already feel that the program has broadened my exposure to possible roles for people with scientific and technical backgrounds to influence policy. I have also learned much about the ways in which data is gathered to assess public opinion of scientific research and science policy.”

Another student said, “The certificate program introduced me to new perspectives about the role of science that did not come with my research training. I left the program with the ability to think broadly about the implications of research on the policy process, as well as the impact of policy on the scientific community. Importantly, when I applied for fellowship programs and awards, the certificate was documented proof of my interest and commitment to science policy.”

The survey results indicate that the Graduate Certificate has been crucial for many students’ professional development and very helpful for job entry. One student said that the course “Science, Technology and Society” (STS) was “one of the most important classes I have ever taken”.

I sat down with Dr. Alexander Lee, a lecturer for CSTPR and CU’s Department Environmental Studies, who this semester is teaching STS—one of the required courses for the Graduate Certificate. Dr. Lee’s curriculum for the course centers around seminal science and technology policy texts (such as Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions) and, admittedly, topics that he finds interesting. Though he specializes in environmental ethics, he likes to keep the course broad. “It wouldn’t be unusual for a class like this [in an ENVS program] to focus on just issues like climate change or ecological degradation, whereas I think it’s very important to understand those issues in the broader context of science and society,” says Dr. Lee.

He says that the idea of providing scientists with policy and communication skills is not new, but the formalization of it into a certificate program is relatively uncommon. “Often scientists—and when I worked as a glaciologist I found this—are required to use technical language and put technical constraints on how you present things, and that’s not always the most effective way science can be communicated and works in the world as a tool,” says Dr. Lee. He thinks that scientists should be able to effectively write and talk about science in a general way.

So why is it important to engage scientists in policymaking? Dr. Lee noted that scientists are often acknowledged as “experts” in their field and believes that it’s important for scientists to understand this responsibility and what it means in a social context.

In terms of the future of science policy, he says, “We’re hitting a lot of really novel issues in science policy…we are facing what I think are truly new types problems as a global community, whether it be climate change or the technological revolution that we’re currently in. It seems like these are global in scale, exponential in growth, and not well analogous to problems in the past.”

All in all, programs like CSTPR’s Graduate Certificate help to bridge disciplines and effectively utilize new information and diverse skill sets. For more information on the Graduate Certificate in Science and Technology, please visit this link and contact Ami Nacu-Schmidt at ami.nacu-schmidt@colorado.edu.

by Jason Vogel, Elizabeth McNie, David Behar
Climate Services, 2016

Our recent paper, “Co-producing actionable science for water utilities” (Vogel et al., 2016), examined how four water utilities in New York City, Portland, Seattle, and Tampa Bay, all members of the Water Utility Climate Alliance, used a ‘chain of models’ approach that emphasized collaboration between scientists and decision makers to produce useful, climate-relevant information over the first three years of their Piloting Utility Modeling Applications project. These collaborations helped utilities fit climate information into their specific management context. We found that in order to produce useful information, these partnerships focused on making the research context-sensitive and relevant, developing knowledge networks, and taking an entrepreneurial approach to assessment.

Each water utility engaged in a ‘chain-of-models’ exercise to better understand how climate changes might affect their water systems. The chain-of-models refers to the sequence of climate, hydrologic, and water operations models used to apply climate change information to water utility decision making.  By running climate projections thorough this chain-of-models, the impacts of projected climate changes can be understood and water utilities can consider taking adaptation action to prepare for or alleviate those potential impacts.

Our first finding, consistent with the literature on co-production, determined that context matters in a number of ways. First, the research questions were generated not by researchers working independently from water managers, but rather, with them, ensuring that the research questions took each utility’s immediate needs into consideration, resulting in research that was highly relevant. Second, possible extreme events that the utilities could experience were contextualized for their specific region and addressed specific questions posed by the utilities, so that the resulting science could fit easily into existing decision frameworks. Third, the researchers worked with each utility to customize the hydrometeorology to ensure that the models used could fit with existing technical capacities of each each utility.

Our second finding, also consistent with the literature on co-production, illustrated the importance of knowledge networks and active partnerships with scientists. Interactions between utility and scientific partners were often carefully designed to occur early and often, and to include substantive and meaningful discussion of project progress toward identified goals. Most of these knowledge networks persist beyond the period reported in our paper and form the foundation for on-going work at each of the four utilities.

Our third finding identified a new factor in co-production, what we call an entrepreneurial approach to the research agenda. In our case studies we saw the utilities themselves drive methodological innovation in climate model downscaling and hydrologic modeling to resolve their particular problems and allow climate projections to be useful in their utility context. One utility developed a variation on the “delta method” downscaling methodology to better understand how extreme events might affect their water system. A second utility developed a new statistical downscaling technique which did a better job than off-the-shelf statistical downscaling tools of replicating the spatial and temporal distribution of rainfall for their region, the key driver of local water supply. Another utility worked with their science partners to bias-correct a widely accepted hydrologic dataset in order to better capture orographic effects important in its local watershed and to better reflect the instrumental record.

For readers who would like to learn more about this interesting project focused on an applied research agenda, we recommend reading our peer reviewed article in Climate Services (Vogel, et al. 2016) and the project final report (Vogel, et al. 2015).

Vogel, J., E. McNie, and D. Behar. 2016. Co-producing actionable science for water utilities. Climate Services. doi: 10.1016/j.cliser.2016.06.003.

Vogel, J.M., J.B. Smith, M. O’Grady, P. Fleming, K. Heyn, A. Adams, D. Pierson, K. Brooks, and D. Behar, 2015. Actionable science in practice: Co-producing climate change information for water utility vulnerability assessments. Prepared for the Water Utility Climate Alliance. May.