A document by Raj Pandya. Click on the document to view its contents.

A document by Raj Pandya. Click on the document to view its contents.

Several bills moving through Congress are likely to provide significant funding for expanding research and results in climate change solutions (CCS). This is also a priority of the Biden-Harris Administration. The National Science Foundation (NSF) will be expected to distribute and manage much of this funding through its grant processes. Effective solutions require both a continuation and expansion of research on climate change–to understand and thus plan for potential impacts locally to globally and to continually assess solutions against a changing climate–and rapid adoption and implementation of this science with society at all levels. NSF asked AGU to convene its community to help provide guidance and recommendations for enabling significant and impactful CCS outcomes by 1 June. AGU was asked in particular to address the following: 1. Identify the biggest, more important interdisciplinary/convergent challenges in climate change that can be addressed in the next 2 to 3 years 2. Create 2-year and 3-year roadmaps to address the identified challenges. Indicate partnerships required to deliver on the promise. 3. Provide ideas on the creation of an aggressive outreach/communications plan to inform the public and decision makers on the critical importance of geoscience. 4. Identify information, training, and other resources needed to embed a culture of innovation, entrepreneurialism, and translational research in the geosciences. Given the short time frame for this report, AGU reached out to key leaders, including Council members, members of several committees, journal editors, early career scientists, and also included additional stakeholders from sectors relevant to CCS, including community leaders, planners and architects, business leaders, NGO representatives, and others. Participants were provided a form to submit ideas, and also invited to two workshops. The first was aimed at ideation around broad efforts and activities needed for impactful CCS; the second was aimed at in depth development of several broad efforts at scale. Overall, about 125 people participated; 78 responded to the survey, 82 attended the first workshop, and 28 attended the more-focused second workshop (see contributor list). This report provides a high-level summary of these inputs and recommendations, focusing on guiding principles and several ideas that received broader support at the workshops and post-workshop review. These guiding principles and ideas cover a range of activities and were viewed as having high importance for realizing impactful CCS at the scale of funding anticipated. These cover the major areas of the charge, including research and solutions, education, communication, and training. The participants and full list of ideas and suggestions are provided as an appendix. Many contributed directly to this report; the listed authors are the steering committee.

Community science is a collaboration between scientists and communities including their citizens and their leaders. In this collaboration, the scientists and communities together determine the questions to be studied, the approaches to be taken, and the interpretation of the results. Such a collaboration requires a foundation of scientific literacy within the community to enable both individuals and the community as whole to access the needed scientific understanding and to participate in the scientific process. It also requires that scientists and educators learn about the knowledge, values, norms, and priorities of the communities in which they are working—a kind of scientific community literacy. The EarthConnections Alliance supports the engagement of educational institutions and programs in community science while building community science literacy and scientific community literacy. The EarthConnections Alliance is formed of regional groups that are invested in linking geoscience learning and community service across grade levels within their communities as well as program partners who have expertise needed to create these learning opportunities. All members share a vision of creating learning pathways with four critical elements: 1) they connect opportunities to learn geoscience with opportunities to use this knowledge in service to the local community; 2) they link geoscience learning opportunities and learners across grade levels; 3) they use signposting and mentoring to guide and support students; and 4) they lead to local employment opportunities and geoscience-related careers. Initial funding for EarthConnections explored the creation of regional pathways in diverse sites across the country, the development of strategies and tools for supporting pathway development, and mechanisms for sharing resources and expertise within the Alliance. Over 125 individuals and groups are now engaged in this effort. Further information is available on the EarthConnections website: serc.carleton.edu/EarthConnections.html.

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is pleased to submit this RFI response to 2021-13640 on improving federal scientific integrity policies. AGU is the largest global organization covering the Earth sciences with a mission “to support and inspire a global community of individuals and organizations interested in advancing discovery in Earth and space sciences and its benefit for humanity and the environment.” Fostering integrity is a key part of our new strategic plan and past activities and we are engaged in supporting integrity broadly, including with federal agencies. Although not a focus of these recommendations, AGU has often spoken up through position statements and letters related to scientific integrity. Several examples are listed in the references. With this perspective, we urge OSTP to consider two points that we elaborate below: • Fostering integrity–and in turn public trust in science and science policy–requires a broad, holistic view of practices that extend beyond the typical focus on transparency and ethics to include ensuring deeper public engagement, addressing diversity and inclusivity in science and supporting the backbone infrastructure that enables all of these. • The way science is supported, practiced and conducted is changing significantly, as is its dissemination and communication, and these changes have important implications for fostering integrity in the 21st century. Specifically, parts of the culture and reward system of science need improvement to align with these changes, and OSTP and federal policy can be a strong proactive force in enabling this change. This is particularly the case if these policies and practices provide leading examples and extend to federal grants. Many other organizations would then align.

GeoHealth represents the critical intersection between the Earth and environmental sciences, and agricultural and health sciences. Following a specific request from the National Science Foundation (NSF) this report provides a series of recommendations aimed at empowering research, building fundamental workforce capacity, and improving communication around GeoHealth to the public and policy makers. This development is critical as a robust GeoHealth research enterprise is essential to global health, human and ecosystem well-being, and sustainability. The AGU community along with those from several allied societies provided the recommendations in this report; these were developed for a detailed survey and two workshops. The survey and other input revealed several broad challenges and needs, including highly siloed funding and support for researchers across institutions and societies, the inability to access or combine key datasets, and in particular the lack of clear career trajectories and support. The recommendations consist of: (i) six programmatic areas where significant attention to building a GeoHealth research enterprise is needed; (ii) approaches and concepts for four specific challenges in GeoHealth for which significant results could be enabled rapidly, within 2-3 years; (iii) ideas for developing an education/career path and for outreach; (iv) larger “moonshot” ideas that might yield very significant impacts over ca. 10 years. All of these have several common elements and themes: they leverage many directorates within NSF, including all within the GEO division; can build off of existing initiatives; are best developed through partnerships with other agencies and communities; and rely on open and FAIR data sets. Although the focus of these recommendations is toward and for the NSF, the suggestions are more general and hopefully will be considered by other funding agencies and other parts of the research enterprise in the U.S. and internationally.