NOAA Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA): Moving forward on climate adaptation, risk management, and community engagement

Abstract:

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has been funding one of the nation’s most innovative networks of investigators and practitioners working on climate risk management and adaptation planning. This Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) network has over two decades of experience bringing science into practice where scientists co-design approaches with managers and planners who have to cope with climate daily and into the future. While the earlier decades focused more on improving knowledge of physical impacts and scenarios and assessing decision makers’ needs/contexts, we are more than ever seeing the need to advance approaches that tackle the complex societal issues surrounding adaptation planning, implementation, and building community resilience.

The presentation will provide examples of recent transdisciplinary approaches that include social science, practitioner knowledge, and evaluation as key components. RISA teams are granted five-year cooperative agreements with flexible scopes of work, purposefully allowing better response to evolving user needs and perspectives, the capacity to capitalize on extreme events when they occur, and the flexibility to pursue key partnerships with decision makers in the regions where they reside. Each region is allowed to define its scope based on relevant socio-cultural and climatic contexts and possible futures. While work is predominantly based in the region, new cross region collaborations have supported the sharing of expertise and the scaling-up of tools for national applicability. Newer efforts bring societal trends and climate science into flood risk management and hazard mitigation planning while comparing across communities in different regions. Progress in developing a theory of change for the program to articulate shared goals and proposed outcomes will be highlighted as will the priorities of our 2021 call for proposals.