Approaches to Evaluate Actionable Science for Climate Adaptation
Science produced by the National and Regional Climate Adaptation Science Center (CASC) network must ideally be scientifically sound, relevant to a management decision, fair and respectful of stakeholders’ divergent values, and produced through a process of iterative collaboration between scientists and managers. However, research that aims to produce usable knowledge and collaborative approaches that boost usability are not common in academia or federal research programs. As a result, neither the process of creating such research nor the impacts to stakeholders are well understood or well documented. This lack of attention to the processes and impacts of collaborative scientist-stakeholder knowledge production also limits our ability to evaluate research outcomes beyond standard academic metrics such as number of peer reviewed journal publications, conference presentations, or students trained. CASC-funded researchers have previously proposed a cohort of 45 indicators for evaluating the co-production of climate knowledge by conducting a review of the academic literature, examining metrics used by other agencies to evaluate usable science, and compiling insights from experienced researchers and managers. While this research has resulted in a rich set of data, constraints on resources, such as time and funding, have limited the team to working with a small sample of case study projects from the Southwest and Northwest CASCs. This project will address the issue of scalability in evaluation, both in terms of number of projects evaluated and number of stakeholders targeted. An evaluation approach that encompasses a center’s full portfolio of projects will better enable the intercomparison of funding choices and co-production approaches. This evaluation will focus on completed projects from the North Central and South Central CASCs. Researchers will distribute a survey to targeted stakeholders in order to learn more about their interactions with project teams and their use of specific products. Results from this project will inform decisions made by the CASC network about future projects in order to ensure good stewardship of federal funds.