Building community resilience through co-production of knowledge

A standard path for conducting 'curiosity-driven' research is to formulate a question, decide on methods to use, collect and analyze data, and disseminate results. Results achieved this way may have immense scientific value, but their applicability to real-world decisions may be limited by the way results are presented, by lack of understanding or trust in the methods, by institutional barriers, and a host of other challenges. Simply saying "decisionmakers should sit up and take note of my results" in the last paragraph of the paper does not increase the odds of adoption.

The Climate Impacts Research Consortium, one of 11 projects of the NOAA RISA (Regional Integrated Science and Assessments) program, has undertaken four community adaptation projects, each with a duration of 2-3 years. Two projects took place on the Pacific coast (in Tillamook County, Oregon, and Grays Harbor County, Washington), one took place in central Idaho, and one just began in Spokane, WA. In each case, significant time - perhaps a third of the overall time - goes into jointly defining the research question. Community buy-in of data and methods, through iterative communication and refinement, takes another significant amount of time. By the end of each community adaptation project, participants show high levels of understanding of the project's data, methods, and results, as well as of the broader subject matter of climate variability and change, and also express interest in applying the results in decisions they face. Comparing the motivations, leadership, and knowledge generation, we augment the lessons described by Meadow et al. (Weather, Climate, and Society 2015).