Reports & Papers

This paper of the Global Environmental Assessment Project (GEA) examines fisheries assessment failures in New England and Newfoundland. While scientific assessments proved ineffective determinants of sustainable policies in both cases, a comparative analysis reveals important differences. In New England, ominous assessments were ignored by decisionmakers while in Newfoundland more optimistic assessments led decisionmakers astray. This contrast in outcomes illustrates the countervailing perils associated with the degree to which scientific assessment processes are embedded within the organizations that use assessments to inform their decisions. Embedded assessments are often influential within their host organization, but are apt to raise suspicions outside of them. Disembedded assessments garner less suspicion, but run the risk of being marginalized when their conclusions conflict with the objectives of decisionmaking organizations. Given the prevailing conditions within their respective issue domains, this analysis suggests that scientific assessments were insufficiently embedded in New England's regulatory structure while exceedingly embedded in Newfoundland's.

The 2001 Summer Study of the Research and Assessment Systems for Sustainability Program was a working session to advance the intellectual agenda of science and technology for sustainability. Discussion focused primarily on issues of vulnerability and resilience, as they provide an exceptionally rich "case study" for exploring the conceptual and design challenges facing efforts to build place-based, integrative systems of research, assessment and decision support that can more effectively address problems arising through the interactions of society and environment. The particular objective of the Summer Study was to make significant progress in addressing the following four related groups of questions: what is the Research and Assessment Systems for Sustainability Program's model of vulnerability/resilience for coupled human-environment systems; how can this model be refined, tested, and applied; how can integrated systems of research, assessment and decision support be designed to enable such work; and what methodological and modeling innovations are needed to facilitate the analysis of such systems and to advance understanding of the nonlinear, multi-scale, rapidly evolving relationships between nature and society that are the focus of sustainability science? This paper reports on the discussion at the Summer Study on these four core sets of questions.

Seasonal climate forecasts offer the possibility of helping people to change their decisions in response to scientific information. With an improving ability to model and predict the El Niño / Southern Oscillation, climatologists are able to issues seasonal forecasts that in some places are quite reliable. One such place, is Zimbabwe, lying in the semi-arid tropics of southern Africa, and with an economy highly dependent on rain-fed agriculture. Starting in 1997, there have been efforts to apply seasonal forecasts to decision making in Zimbabwe. The success of these efforts has been mixed. This study examines these efforts, and attempts to explain why they may have been more or less successful. Drawing off literature in environmental assessment, risk communication, and behavioral economics, this study offers guidance for ways to improve the forecast applications process, particularly with respect to the communication of probabilistic information. Additionally, this study seeks to test whether the recommended course of action-a highly participatory assessment process examining uncertainties in great detail-could succeed, through the undertaking of a behavioral economic experiment in rural villages throughout the country. The experimental results suggest the approach could work.

A growing number of municipal governments are joining efforts to mitigate global climate change. For example, 75 city and county governments in the U.S. participate in the Cities for Climate Protection (CCP) campaign sponsored by the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives (ICLEI). Leaders in these communities have publicly recognized global climate change as a legitimate concern at the local level and committed to addressing that threat by controlling local greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Why do municipal governments join the CCP campaign and make these commitments, especially given that climate change is generally framed as a global issue? Why have some CCP member cities been more successful in implementing policies and programs to control GHG emissions? Of particular interest is the role of global climate change assessment in the process of reframing global warming as a local issue and in developing local policies for controlling GHG emissions.

The last several years have witnessed a significant evolution in what society wants to know about global environmental risks such as climate change, ozone depletion, and biodiversity loss. Until recently, most scientific assessments of such risks focused on the anatomy of conceivable environmental changes themselves, while devoting relatively little attention to the ecosystems and societies the changes might endanger. Recently, however, questions about the vulnerability of social and ecological systems are emerging as a central focus of policy-driven assessments of global environmental risks. Meeting the growing demand for a deeper and more useful understanding of vulnerability to global change will require a dual strategy in which initiatives targeted on immediate assessment needs and research opportunities complement and feed into a longer term program for enhancing relevant knowledge bases, assessment practices, and institutional capacities. This paper makes recommendations for the design of such a strategy that emerged from an ongoing conversation between communities of decision-oriented vulnerability assessors for global environmental change issues, research-oriented vulnerability scholars generally focusing on regional scale human-environment interactions, and those conducting vulnerability assessments that assist in targeting improved intervention and mitigation strategies. It sketches an integrated framework for vulnerability-based assessments of climate and other global changes. By virtue of both concept and design this framework has the potential to improve significantly the production of policy-relevant insights into the social and environmental implications of global environmental change. This paper was prepared as a brief summary of the Workshop on Vulnerability to Global Environmental Change: Challenges for Research, Assessment and Decision Making, held on May 22-25, 2000 at Airlie House in Warrenton, Virginia.