Building community, credibility and knowledge: the third US National Climate Assessment

Katharine Jacobs () and James Buizer

Climatic Change, 2016, vol. 135, issue 1, 9-22

Abstract: Assessments that are designed to be credible and useful in the eyes of potential users must rigorously evaluate the state of knowledge but also address the practical considerations—politics, economics, institutions, and procedures—that affect real-world decision processes. The Third US National Climate Assessment (NCA3) authors integrated a vast array of sources of scientific information to understand what natural, physical and social systems are most at risk from climate change. They were challenged to explore some of the potentially substantial sources of risk that occur at the intersections of social, economic, biological, and physical systems. In addition, they worked to build bridges to other ways of knowing and other sources of knowledge, including intuitive, traditional, cultural, and spiritual knowledge. For the NCA3, inclusion of a broad array of people with on-the-ground experience in various communities, sectors and regions helped in identifying issues of practical importance. The NCA3 was more than a climate assessment; it was also an experiment in testing theories of coproduction of knowledge. A deliberate focus on the assessment process as well as the products yielded important outcomes. For example, encouraging partnerships and engagement with existing networks increased learning and made the idea of a sustained assessment more realistic. The commitment to building an assessment focused on mutual learning, transparency, and engagement contributed to the credibility and legitimacy of the product, and the saliency of its contents. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016

Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s10584-015-1445-8 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:spr:climat:v:135:y:2016:i:1:p:9-22

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer.com/economics/journal/10584

DOI: 10.1007/s10584-015-1445-8

Access Statistics for this article

Climatic Change is currently edited by M. Oppenheimer and G. Yohe

More articles in Climatic Change from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().