Final Report: Evaluating the Impact of Climate Science Produced by the Southwest CSC on Resource Management Agency Decisions

The impacts of climate change are already being observed in our ecosystems and communities. Decision makers at all scales are looking for the best scientific information to guide their decisions about adapting to and mitigating the negative effects of climate change. The mission of the Climate Adaptation Science Centers (CASCs)is to deliver science to help fish, wildlife, water, land, and people adapt to a changing climate.

Beginning in late 2013, we began a process of developing an approach to assess how knowledge was being produced between and among researchers and natural resource management practitioners in projects funded through the CASC network. Our project began in the Southwest CASC and expanded to the Northwest CASC in 2015. Here were present the findings of our assessment of 16 projects; seven from the Southwest region and nine from the Northwest.

Our goals were first to develop and pilot a framework for evaluating collaborative climate science research projects (Wall, Meadow, and Horangic 2017), then to apply it to CASC-funded projects in an effort to provide CASC funders with feedback about the processes and outcomes of the projects. We used the 16 projects from the SW and NW to pilot our proposed framework. As this is the first effort to evaluate the impacts of CASC-funded research on agency decisions, we consider this to be baseline data about the two CASCs that will be most useful when used in conjunction with future evaluations that can demonstrate growth and change within the Centers and catalogue the management decisions associated with those changes over time. Based on the CASC goal and mission, which was drawing from literature on co-production of knowledge and actionable science, we based our framework around a theory of change that states that intensive engagement between researchers and practitioners throughout the research process will yield more usable scientific findings and more use of findings by the practitioners involved. We designed the evaluation framework to explore, to as great an extent as possible, the type, timing, and intensity of engagement between researchers and practitioners (Wall, Meadow, and Horangic 2017).

We report here on the types of engagement we documented in the16 cases and the points at which engagement occurred during the projects.Types of engagement provides insights into how much interaction occurred between researchers and practitioners. The points of engagement provided additional details about the extentto which practitioners were involved in various aspects of the research process itself. We then explore the impacts of these project on the practitioners and agencies involved: conceptual impacts such as improved understanding of an issue, instrumental impacts such as use of research findings to inform or support agency decisions and actions, capacity-building for practitioners, enduring connectivity between and among researchers and practitioners, and attitude changes about engaged research.