by Tania Rabesandratana

Science
May 22, 2015

The European Commission extended an olive branch to the scientific community on 13 May. Surrounded by six Nobel laureates, commission President Jean-Claude Juncker announced his long-awaited plan to restructure the commission’s scientific advice process—and tried to reassure scientists that policymakers in Brussels will take their views seriously. Under the commission’s new Science Advice Mechanism, a high-level group of seven scientists will channel the input of national academies and learned societies to give the commission the best scientific advice.

The announcement ends months of suspense. When Juncker took office last November, he didn’t renew the position of chief scientific adviser (CSA), then held by Scottish biologist Anne Glover. But he didn’t offer an alternative, either—which some scientists, especially in the United Kingdom, took as a sign of disregard for science (Science, 21 November 2014, p. 904). Although last week’s announcement provided critics with some reassurance, many details remain to be worked out, including how the high-level group will operate effectively. “[C]ommittees in general are at risk of being conservative, reaching conclusions that no one member stands behind and consensus that doesn’t really exist,” the British group Sense About Science wrote in a lukewarm reaction.

In relying on a collective rather than a single person, the new structure is more suited to the commission’s culture of consensus, says Jerzy Langer, a physicist and former deputy science minister in Poland who’s familiar with the intricacies of E.U. policymaking. While CSAs are a fixture in the United Kingdom and the United States, most European countries have never had them, Langer points out. “The commission by definition is a collective body, which must consult member states. The CSA is alien,” he says. Glover expressed “strong opinions”—for instance emphasizing the safety of genetically modified crops—and that was “uncomfortable for the commission,” adds Sofie Vanthournout, head of the Brussels office of the European Academies Science Advisory Council (EASAC).

Unlike Glover, the new group won’t be employed by the commission and thus will be independent, research commissioner Carlos Moedas said last week. It will also have better support: The commission will assign about 25 people in Brussels to run the new advice mechanism. Robert-Jan Smits, the commission’s director-general for research, was reported as saying last week that the group is not expected to provide direct advice but rather to act as a “watchdog” to ensure that the commission draws on adequate evidence. “National academies are ideally placed to provide such advice,” a research representative for the commission says, “but the idea is to cast the web as widely as possible and engage the broader scientific community when needed.”

The commission will put €6 million on the table next year to help EASAC and four other European networks—representing 90 academies and learned societies—work together. According to the commission’s draft call for proposals, seen by Science, academies should use that money to “animate public debate,” produce joint events and policy papers, and set up a “working mechanism” to provide advice efficiently and fast. That will not be easy, Vanthournout says: Developing interdisciplinary, pan-European recommendations means aligning a host of national procedures for peer reviews and endorsements, she says. “We’ve never really done it because it [takes] extra resources.”

Langer says the commission’s insistence on involving academies is mostly a show of “courtesy.” Academy members are eminent scientists, but “they are often over 80 years old; they are not decision-makers,” he says. And “in contrast to the United States, the academic scene in Europe is extremely dispersed” across countries and disciplines; gathering input from it will be a lengthy, convoluted affair. That patchwork makes the new high-level group a “recipe for future problems,” wrote Roger Pielke of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder, on his blog last week. Read more …

Nature Climate Change
May 21, 2015

Politicians increasingly tout short-term climate adaptation as a ‘no regrets’ strategy. But it’s becoming clear that such policies can sometimes unexpectedly increase vulnerability.

Lisa Dilling and colleagues from the University of Colorado Boulder and the National Center for Atmospheric Research, USA, surveyed over 150 pieces of literature that assess climate adaptation policies, including the latest Assessment Report of the IPCC. Policies were deemed to be no regrets options if they were “considered worthwhile in their own right, independent of climate change considerations”.

The researchers found that although many policies reduced vulnerability to current climatic events, they sometimes increased communities’ vulnerability in other ways. For instance, building flood defences led to greater numbers of people living on flood plains, increasing exposure to catastrophic events should the defences be breached. In another case, Ghanaian workers started producing charcoal to supplement farming and fishing livelihoods that were at risk from climate change. But the charcoal production led to longer-term forest degradation that put the communities at greater risk.

Dilling and colleagues call for a more critical appraisal of supposedly no regrets climate adaptation policies. Such policies must be considered as part of a connected system, they argue, in an attempt to decrease overall vulnerability to future climatic events. Read more …

Science Business
May 13, 2015
by Éanna Kelly

A long-running spat over scientific policy came to a surprise finish with an announcement from the European Commission that it will appoint a seven-member panel to provide it with vetted scientific advice on policy.

In a departure from the previous way of doing things, when a single Chief Scientific Advisor (CSA) reported to the Commission President, the new group of  seven senior scientists will be accessible to all top lawmakers in Brussels. The new system will also create a funnel to better access expertise in Europe’s national academies and learned societies.

Research Commissioner Carlos Moedas, who drew up the plan and wants to have it running by Autumn, said his role in the new system will be that of a go-between.

“I will be a political facilitator… matching demand [from Commissioners] with supply [the appropriate expert],” he said at a press conference earlier today.

The announcement – at least a month earlier than expected – is intended to end a nasty political fight that had broken out in Brussels over a seemingly academic question: Who is best qualified to advise the EU on what scientific evidence has to say about policy? The issue had cropped up repeatedly in arguments over genetically modified organisms, stem cell research, shale gas and other issues. In each case, opponents had accused each other of distorting the scientific facts to argue their point – and then accused the Commission of listening to the wrong scientists when making its decisions.

It all came to a head last year, when Anne Glover, the CSA, was accused by environmental activists of being cozy with pro-GMO companies. She denied it; but the new Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, apparently decided it was a political fuss he didn’t want to perpetuate – and so he didn’t renew her mandate in the job.

Juncker asked Moedas to come up with a new system of scientific advice – and that’s what was announced May 13th in Brussels at a news conference.

Who will be on the panel?

The process of picking members for the panel has yet to begin. “It’s not up to politicians [to do this],” said Moedas. Instead, a selection committee – comprising three or four people – will “go around the world” to find the right candidates, according to the Commissioner.

The European Research Council (ERC), a frontier research funder in Europe which also has an independent, high-level committee, has been a clear inspiration for Moedas’ design. “We’ll copy the model for how the ERC chooses the best people,” he confirmed. He may also have cast an eye to places like Finland, Denmark and Greece or his own country Portugal: all have governments that rely on advisory committees for science advice.

Selected scientists will retain their day jobs and sit on Moedas’ new panel part-time, although it’s not known how frequently they’ll meet. “They will not be employees of the Commission,” said Moedas. They will however be compensated for the days they meet in Brussels.

No budget for the new panel was announced but up to 25 civil servants from the Commission’s research directorate could help staff the panel, Moedas said. By comparison, a staff of two, eventually rising to five, served Glover during her three year term.

A key part of the new system will be drawing on expertise housed in national academies around Europe, the Commission added.

Creating a more regular funnel between academies and Brussels won’t be hard, said Matthias Johannsen, executive secretary of the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities (ALLEA), an umbrella group comprising 58 academies: “We have coordination mechanisms already in place between our members and other associations and we hope to extend them to the Commission.”

An all-star cast of award-winning European scientists – including Sir Paul Nurse, Jules Hoffmann, Serge Haroche, László Lovász, Jean Tirole and Edvard Ingjald Moser – were invited to the launch today in Commission HQ. Moedas didn’t comment on whether any of this distinguished group would be joining the new panel – or have a hand in selecting it.

A source close to the discussions said the invitation served as symbolic gesture, if nothing else. “Among them were those who vocally opposed the Commission’s decision to abolish Glover’s office.”

Much still to be seen

Initial reactions from research lobbyists and non-governmental organisations were positive. Kurt Deketelaere, Secretary-General of the League of European Research Universities, released a statement saying: “An open and continuous dialogue between the scientific community and the EU policy makers is absolutely crucial and necessary. An important step has been made today.”

Martin Pigeon, a researcher with Corporate Europe Observatory, a campaign group which was critical of the old CSA post, wrote: “The decision by the Commission to replace the CSA position with a committee is in itself a progress from an independence perspective, as it is harder to influence a committee than an individual and it will avoid creating the problematic symbolic power of a ‘science chief’.

But how the new panel works in practice is another story.

Reading the tea leaves, Roger Pielke, a professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado, sees a potential conflict of interest in the new science panel drawing staff from the Commission’s research directorate.

“It is a little bit like putting an agricultural ministry in charge of advocating for farmers and for healthy diets. You’d like to think that these two interests always go hand in hand, but experience shows that they sometimes don’t. Experience shows that separating institutions that support science and those that support policy helps to avoid unnecessary conflicts,” he writes in a blog post. Read more …

A team of CSTPR researchers is on the story

University of Colorado Arts & Sciences Magazine
April 30, 2015

By Meagan M. Taylor

It’s not an overstatement to say that Boulder is an international hub for environmental devotees: atmospheric research experts and polar-bear habitat activists alike.

But Max Boykoff, associate professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, has a unique vantage point on the subject of climate change. Instead of measuring icecap melt, he measures social reactions to such events, on a global scale.

You might say he analyzes the analysts.

Boykoff’s Media and Climate Change Observatory (MeCCO) project examines global mass media coverage of climate change topics, to gauge the scope and level of public dialogue on the wellbeing of spaceship earth.

“We developed ways to look at where and when the conversation is happening,” he says of the research methodology. “We can tell what events indicate ebbs and flows in coverage, and what kinds of things facilitate the conversation or impede it.”

His idea to create MeCCO stemmed from a conversation with a colleague at Oxford University, where Boykoff is a senior visiting research associate in the university’s Environmental Change Institute.

“We were interested in climate coverage between the UK and U.S. media, but a lot of the conversation was speculative” he says. “We said we should have some kind of monitoring system for media coverage.”

The idea led him to found a graduate project for the CU-Boulder’s Center for Science and Technology Policy Research (CSTPR), housed within the Cooperative Institute for Research and Environmental Sciences (CIRES).

The MeCCO team is composed of Boykoff, five graduate students, and post-doctoral researcher and visiting fellow Gesa Luedecke.

Each month, the team extracts publications containing the terms “climate change” or “global warming” from 50 sources in 25 countries, accessed through record databases Lexis Nexis, Proquest and Factiva. Boykoff also has counterparts at climate research institutes in Spain and Japan who compile articles from their national databases.

“I think this project is a really valuable resource,” Luedecke says. “It’s objective, and it reflects what is important to our society.”

Objective, because the researchers cull data based on a consistent set of criteria. They target publications with a large and diverse geographical range, broad circulation, and reliable access to archives over time.

Access to archives is particularly important because not all media warehouse their data, Boykoff explains. Television media archives, for instance, may store content for only a few days, and outside of the U.S., saved content is virtually nonexistent.

While TV news and Twitter seem to be the most ubiquitous messengers of death-by-carbon-emissions, MeCCO uses only newspaper sources, for their consistency and predominance.

“Newspapers are influencers,” Boykoff says. “Print media is able to dig in substantively into issues.”

But sorting through the deluge of information published on climate change is much more complex than just counting newspaper clippings.

The team has indexed four factors that determine the quantity and range of coverage: political events, scientific findings, meteorological events and social inputs.

Political events and publication of new scientific research may be the most obvious factors that cause a ruckus in the press.

The November 2014 joint announcement by the United States and China to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in the next 10 to 15 years preceded a spike in coverage that month. Read more …