Systems of Integrated Research, Assessment, and Decision Support for Global Environmental Change

经过十多年的积极、协调的努力，来自不同学科的研究人员以及私营、半私营和公共部门的官员寻求获得关于如何应对全球环境变化的见解，他们开始研究不同研究方法和策略的相对功效。本项目旨在设计和评估战略，使下一代国家和国际全球环境变化项目能够更有效地整合和支持其研究、评估和决策支持活动。特别是，一个跨学科的研究小组打算催化和促进三个相互关联的工作线：(1)扩大全球变化议程，以更直接地参与过去二十年中另一个重大的新环境理念的议程：可持续性。该团队的目标是促进全球变化议程的重构，使其研究能够广泛而战略性地参与到世界上各种最紧迫的发展挑战中。(2)对全球变化的影响和脆弱性形成基于地点的综合认识。该团队的目标是将自然科学和社会科学的观点结合起来，开发和测试共同的概念框架和分析方法，用于综合区域研究与全球变化相关的多重、累积、互动压力效应和多重时间尺度反应。(3)设计、支持和管理能够更好地整合全球变化问题的研究、评估和决策支持活动的系统。该团队的目标是评估这种集成的替代模型，特别强调集中和分布式系统之间的权衡和紧张关系，设计的稳定性与适应性，好奇心驱动与问题驱动的优先设置，以及政府与非政府和混合机构设置。研究人员将通过与全球变化相关的知识的生产、评估和应用的一小部分领先学者和项目经理之间的国际合作，为应对这些挑战的战略发展做出贡献。其中包括自然科学家、社会科学家和政策分析师，以及来自多个国家的个人，他们在运行或建议研究和评估项目方面具有丰富的经验。利用一组合作者和通过该项目支持的共享博士后学生，该团队将对上述每个主题进行研究，提供一系列重要的评论和科学论文。正在进行的工作将在每月一次的电子研讨会上进行审查，该研讨会将尝试不同的方法，将项目负责人和受邀嘉宾聚集在一起，进行激烈、协作和累积的对话，而不需要所有参与者进行广泛的旅行。此外，特设研讨会和延长的夏季研究将被用来确保跨项目组成部分的互动和整合。该项目的成果，包括评论、论文、正在进行的工作和专题讨论会的摘要，将在一个开放论坛网站上公布，以鼓励和促进对该项目的问题进行更广泛的讨论。该项目由美国国家科学基金会和美国国家海洋和大气管理局（NOAA）联合支持。

After more than a decade of active, coordinated effort, researchers from a diverse set of disciplines as well as private-, semi-private-, and public-sector officials seeking to obtain insights regarding how to deal with global environmental change have begun examining the relative efficacy of different research approaches and strategies. This project seeks to design and evaluate strategies with which the next generation of national and international global environmental change programs might more effectively integrate and support its research, assessment and decision-support activities. In particular, an interdisciplinary team of investigators intends to catalyze and contribute to three interrelated lines of work: (1) Broadening the global change agenda to engage more directly the agenda of the other big new environmental idea of the last twenty years: sustainability. The team's goal is to promote a reframing of the global change agenda in terms that will help to keep its research broadly but strategically engaged with a wide range of the world's most pressing development challenges. (2) Developing a place-based, integrated understanding of global change effects and vulnerabilities. The team's goal is to combine natural and social science perspectives to develop and test common conceptual frameworks and analytic approaches for the integrated regional study of multiple, cumulative, interactive stress effects and multiple time scale responses related to global change. (3) Designing, supporting, and managing systems that can better integrate research, assessment and decision support activities on problems of global change. The team's goal is to evaluate alternative models for such integration, with special emphasis on the trade-offs and tensions between centralized and distributed systems, stability versus adaptability of design, curiosity-driven versus problem-driven priority setting, and governmental versus nongovernmental and hybrid institutional settings. The investigators will contribute to the evolution of strategies for meeting these challenges through an international collaboration among a small set of leading scholars and program managers involved in the production, assessment, and application of knowledge relating to global change. These include natural scientists, social scientists, and policy analysts as well as individuals from several countries with substantial experience in running or advising research and assessment programs. Using a group of collaborators and shared postdoctoral students supported through the project, the team will conduct research on each of the main themes noted above providing a series of critical reviews and state of the science papers. Work in progress will be reviewed at a monthly electronic colloquium, which will experiment with different approaches for bringing together program principals and invited guests in an intense, collaborative, and cumulative dialog without requiring extensive travel for all participants. In addition, ad hoc workshops and an extended summer study will be used to assure interaction and integration across program components. Products of this project, including reviews, papers, work in progress and summaries of the colloquium sessions, will be posted on an open-forum web site to encourage and facilitate a wider discussion of the program's issues. This project is jointly supported by NSF and by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).