The Role of Decision Support in Climate Science Research Policy: can the US Climate Science Program Fulfill its Mission?

The US Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) is a massive, $2 billion-per-year effort to combine a broad portfolio of scientific activity into one coherent and integrated climate science program. The bulk of this is manifested in traditional scientific inquiry to generate knowledge about Earth systems, and the development of the infrastructure needed to support this effort. But the guiding vision and supporting mission of the program itself are expressed in terms of societal outcomes that rely on the use of knowledge, not just its generation. Thus an important question for CCSP is how will it translate scientific activity to meet the societal goals it has set for itself? Traditional research policy analysis has tended to focus on products (peer-reviewed papers, new research tools, etc.) or impacts (usually economic) that have no necessary connection to the achievement of societal goals such as those outlined in the CCSP. In this poster I present some initial analysis based on a new methodology called Public Value Mapping which addresses this challenge. With Public Value Mapping, the internal logic of a science policy structure is taken as a starting point for assessing its ability to achieve self- defined goals of intrinsic public value. In the case of the CCSP, decision support is highlighted as a key component that will determine whether or not the program can successfully translate its basic and applied science to socially robust knowledge that is of value to the stakeholders it seeks to serve. I discuss the CCSP's approach to decision support, and the implications of this for the program as a whole, in the context of previous work on the use of science in decision support.