Land-grant lessons for Anthropocene universities

Established amidst the bloodshed of the Civil War, land-grant universities, together with the associated agricultural experiment stations and cooperative extension services, have played a crucial role in democratizing scientific knowledge and addressing intertwined educational, environmental, economic, and democratic challenges within the USA. Indeed, they have arguably pioneered the idea of “usable science.” Today, the urgent challenges of the Anthropocene demand a more robust relationship between scientific research and on-the-ground action, strong networks sharing local lessons globally, and channels for injecting global, long-term perspectives into the noise of short-termism. The land-grant experience provides lessons for “Anthropocene universities” seeking to tackle these challenges, including the importance of (1) establishing or expanding university-based boundary organizations akin to cooperative extension, (2) incentivizing the integration of engagement into the university’s research, teaching, and service missions, (3) centering values of democracy, justice, equity, and inclusion in engagement, and (4) cooperating across institutions and sectors. Given the urgency of fully engaging academic institutions as players and connectors in the real-world challenges of addressing climate change and biodiversity loss, there is little time to waste.

The Critical Role of Communities of Practice and Peer Learning in Scaling Hydroclimatic Information Adoption

Significant effort has been put into advancing the use and usability of information products to support adaptation to drought and climate variability, particularly for the water supply sector. Evidence and experience show that advancing the usability of information through processes such as coproduction is time consuming for both providers and users of information. One challenge for boundary organizations and researchers interested in enhancing the usability of their information is how such processes might “scale” to all the potential organizations and individual managers that might possibly be able to benefit from improved climate information. This paper examines information use preferences and practices specifically among managers of small water systems in the Upper Colorado River basin, with an eye toward identifying new opportunities to effectively scale information usability and uptake among all water managers—regardless of location or capacity—in a resource-constrained world. We find that boundary organizations and other usable science efforts would benefit from capitalizing on the communities of practice that bind water managers together. Specifically, strategic engagement with larger, well-respected water systems as early adopters, supporting dissemination of successes and experiences with new information products among a broader community of water managers, and increasing well-respected water systems’ capacity to engage directly with rural systems may all serve as useful strategies to promote widespread distribution, access, and adoption of information.

Lessons from First-Generation Climate Science Integrators

There is an increasing demand for climate science that decision-makers can readily use to address issues created by climate variability and climate change. To be usable, the science must be relevant to their context and the complex management challenges they face and credible and legitimate in their eyes. The literature on usable science provides guiding principles for its development, which indicate that climate scientists who want to participate in the process need skills in addition to their traditional disciplinary training to facilitate communicating, interacting, and developing and sustaining relationships with stakeholders outside their disciplines. However, the literature does not address questions about what specific skills are needed and how to provide climate scientists with these skills. To address these questions, this article presents insights from interviews with highly experienced and respected "first generation” climate science integrators from across the United States. The term “climate science integrator” is used to refer to climate scientists who specialize in helping decision-makers to integrate the best available climate science into their decision-making processes. The cadre of scientists who participated in the research has largely developed their methods for working successfully with stakeholders without formal training but often with the guidance of a mentor. Their collective wisdom illuminates the kinds of skills needed to be a successful science integrator and provides mentoring for aspiring science integrators. It also suggests the types of training that would cultivate these skills and indicates ways to change academic training and institutions to better encourage the next generation and to support this kind of work.