Outreach

Our team is able to leverage longstanding connections to stakeholders, especially through various University of Arizona and NCAR outreach and communication efforts. This means that we do not have to start from scratch in identifying and building relationships with stakeholders but can work with colleagues who already have relationships of trust and interaction with water, agricultural, and ecosystem managers, especially in the SWUS. We are able to diffuse our climate science results through existing networks, workshops and conferences such as those of the University of Arizona hosted Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS), Southwest Climate Science Center (www.doi.gov/csc/southwest), and UA Water Resources Research Center (https://wrrc.arizona.edu). For the most part, these programs and networks operate in collaboration with stakeholders, respecting their knowledge and asking them what information is most useful. We also plan to work with outreach networks in Mexico and other study regions.

An important component of our EASM project is the evaluation of all outreach and communication efforts, tracking the use and impact of knowledge, and feeding back user responses to the climate science aspects of our project.  One activity connects the EASM evaluation work to IRAP (http://irap.iri.columbia.edu) - a joint initiative of the University of Arizona and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society at Columbia University – where we are evaluating communication and use of drought information and forecasts in the Caribbean and South Asia.