Core Support for the Board on Environmental Change and Society (BECS) of the National Research Council (NRC)

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This award will continue support for core operations of the Board on Environmental Change and Society (BECS) of the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences. This board has functioned under its current and previous names since 1990 to advance science and environmental decision making by promoting integrated analysis of the human interactions with the natural environment. It works with project sponsors to develop products that are problem-focused and that demonstrate a clear role for the social and behavioral sciences in identifying and informing solutions to environmental challenges. BECS will clarify environmental research needs and opportunities for the social and behavioral science research community in order to facilitate the involvement of scientists in these fields to engage in research that will have yield new information and insights of scholarly and practical value as society faces increasingly complex environmental issues. BECS will pay particular attention to the integration of the social and behavioral sciences with the natural sciences in helping ascertain the natural and social contexts of problems faced by environmental decision makers. It will help assess the utility of insights from the social and behavioral sciences to address, and it will help to sharpen the scientific underpinning for analytic and decision-support tools to be developed and applied by governmental agencies and others. In addition to working with sponsors to conduct special problem-focused studies whose findings are widely disseminated, BECS will conduct problem-focused symposia in conjunction with its semi-annual meetings. These symposia will be webcast to enable scholars and practitioners unable to attend to benefit from these discussions during the symposia and afterwards. Benefits from the webcasted symposia and from other BECS products will include insights to help advance fundamental research on environmental topics in the social and behavioral sciences and to assist in the use of those insights by federal agencies and other governmental entities, non-governmental organizations, private firms, and educational organizations.Among the core activities undertaken by the Board on Environmental Change and Society are the maintenance of capacity at the National Academies to respond to requests for integrated analyses of human-environment issues. BECS also will continue nurturing collaborative links between natural scientists and social and behavioral scientists to improve scientific contributions to basic knowledge and applications of that knowledge in environmental settings. BECS also will promote discussions regarding current and future research directions through the conduct of problem-focused symposia in concert with its semi-annual meetings. Finally, BECS will serve as an oversight body for the conduct of focused studies and activities undertaken at the behest of other federal agencies.