Global Environmental Assessment Team

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As part of an NSF Consortium for Research on the Human Dimensions of Global Change, this award provides support for a collaborative study of global environmental assessment. This team effort is based at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government but involves scholars from Carnegie-Mellon, Cornell, and Duke Universities, and from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). The goal of this project is to improve society's ability to integrate science-based assessments in the progressive development, implementation, and evaluation of responses to large-scale, long-term problems of global environmental change. The team conducts empirical and conceptual research, drawing on a variety of disciplinary perspectives, to advance understanding of how assessment is done, how it interacts with policy-making, politics, and negotiations, and how assessment practice could more usefully contribute to effective social management of global environmental change. The team seeks to develop more realistic models of relationships among assessment, policy making and management of global change, avoiding conventional views of assessment-policy relationships as linear and static, and uses these models to critique and improve current practice. Each year, the team recruits an international group of pre- and post-doctoral fellows, with backgrounds in both social and natural sciences. Fellows spend a year engaged in research on environmental assessment and policy, principally in residence at Harvard's Center for Science and International Affairs but with significant periods at the other member institutions. The team adopts one major focus each year -- either assessment experience on a particular global environmental issue, or a particular conceptual approach to the study and criticism of assessment. A one-week summer institute each year brings together all faculty and fellows for an intensive period of collaborative work drawing together the year's work, and producing a monograph for publication.