The Societal Benefits of Geoscience Projects: How Do We Measure Success?
Abstract
Many geoscientists strive to produce knowledge that helps solve pressing societal issues. But how does a geoscientist prove that their projects have been successful in improving outcomes for people and the environment? As with any project or initiative, a key to success is defining metrics for success and developing a strategy for tracking those metrics over time. Metrics for success for many geoscientists include the number of publications tied to a project, journal article citations, or the number of times a dataset or model has been downloaded. While these metrics are good measures of scientific success, they do not provide evidence that new knowledge has been successful in improving people's lives.
To measure how new knowledge improves outcomes for people and the environment, geoscientists can shift to socioeconomically meaningful metrics such as human lives saved, acres of forest conserved, fishery collapses avoided, or increases in firm profits. Demonstrating that changes in these metrics can be attributed to new knowledge can forge stronger linkages between science and society, increase the beneficial use of geoscience knowledge, and help geoscientists communicate the societal benefits of their work. Social science—and economics in particular—offers the geoscience community an effective toolbox for quantifying the societal value of information. The VALUABLES Consortium, a partnership between Resources for the Future and NASA, has developed a microeconomic framework that can be used to measure how information improves societal outcomes when people use it to make specific decisions. This framework helps users identify what information they would need to conduct an impact assessment—a rigorous, quantitative study that investigates how new knowledge is used by people and organizations to make decisions and quantifies the benefits that knowledge provides to society. In this presentation, we will describe this framework and explain how it can be used by teams of geoscientists and social scientists. We will also summarize the consortium's completed and ongoing impact assessments, which quantify the value of using satellite data to enforce air quality standards, regulate air emissions from oil and gas development, detect harmful algal blooms, inform post-wildfire response, and track endangered species.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2020
- Bibcode:
- 2020AGUFMSY010..03K
- Keywords:
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- 0815 Informal education;
- EDUCATION;
- 9820 Techniques applicable in three or more fields;
- GENERAL OR MISCELLANEOUS;
- 1918 Decision analysis;
- INFORMATICS;
- 6349 General or miscellaneous;
- POLICY SCIENCES & PUBLIC ISSUES