She says wishing that were true [LAUGHTER].
I'm Emily CoBabe Ammann.
I'm the chief strategist at CU Boulder,
and among other things,
I run our Grand Challenge,
which is our space, our future,
which is about Earth and space sciences, data sciences.
I was asked to come in and talk to
our chancellor about this program they had started,
our space our future,
and I walked in and
the chancellor and the provost said, yeah,
we're going to turn data into action.
[LAUGHTER] I'm like, you're really
not because you don't know how to do that.
I had come from an organization where I've
been working in the area of climate sciences,
and really had some key lessons that
I had learned extraordinarily the hard way,
some of which I want to share with you,
because if you thought that this was
just going to be us talking at you,
no, we're going to send you
on a little expedition this afternoon,
which is why our talks are designed to be very short.
From my own standpoint,
picking up on this thread is
this notion of our communities and our partners become
critical to our conversation for
almost any transdisciplinary work that we want
to do in support of the human condition.
Building on where Kristine
and Matthew started us this afternoon,
this is a picture of the bridge over Avignon.
I've never been there myself,
but it's clearly beautiful.
This is actually representative of
what many of us are trying to do.
If we at the university are on this side of
the bank and our community that we want to
support is on the other side of the bank,
our job is actually to build
this bridge to
that community on the other side of the river,
and that community could be local,
it could be regional,
it could be national, it could be global.
We all want to solve relevant problems.
We all want particularly as public institutions to hold
that trust with our society to say we are here to serve.
But the number of faculty that
I have who come to me and say,
I do all this great work,
take it and go do something with it.
Like yeah, that actually doesn't really work that way.
Our communities and our partners are
a critical component of
the process that we need to be successful.
But building these bridges is really complicated.
I'll give you just a quick example
from the world of climate services.
We have scientists, and applied scientists,
and data scientists who have a wealth of
information about climate and climate change.
But in order to actually meet our community needs,
we generally have to work with boundary organizations
that can include development banks
and non-governmental organizations,
and national and sub-national governments.
There are structures including
frameworks put forward by the UN and the WMO,
and we haven't even gotten to the community and
the community activists and
the organizations that are working
in representing those communities yet.
All of those, to build
that bridge all the way across the river
and maintain that bridge over time is really hard work.
That's a heavy lift.
The problem is that it's
not just the fact that we have to build this bridge,
but that the bridge involves people
who are not like us here at the university.
It involves levels of education and communication,
there are evaluation matrix
that need to be brought into play and associated
research that are not generally in
our normal sphere of the research that we do.
Of course, building the bridge is not enough.
Because you can build the bridge,
but it's not unidirectional.
In fact, the research on usable science
suggests that usable science becomes that thing
that we're all searching for
when the end-user community is
actually walk and cross the bridge to
us to tell us the questions they want us to answer.
It's not all about us.
It's about them and having them drive
the bus with us to define the research questions
that we want to answer
and help us figure out when we've gotten there
and we're actually providing
value to them as a community.
Even if you can do that,
and like I said it's hard but it is doable.
I think you can take a look at
the global framework for climate services
and see that globally
we're making progress on these things.
We hit immediately another challenge
and that's the issue of scalability.
Several years ago, I
was working with some Colorado ranchers who were
interested in climate change impacts and I asked
them because I'm that person, "What is it that you need?
Just tell me, I'm sure we can do it."
They would say, "I need a climate
scientists to come into my living room every
month to help me make decisions about
water management," because in
Colorado it's all about the water.
All of our water is snowpack
water and climate change is changing our snowpack.
These ranchers are freaking out because
their water has become an
unpredictable and they need our help.
I said that's fabulous.
How many are you? Fifteen thousand.
I got 35,000 wheat farmers in the state,
and the organization that I worked for
had 250 climate scientists,
not most of which I would
actually put in anybody's living room,
due respect to them because I love them,
and we see this time and again.
We can solve a problem in one area.
We can build that bridge in one area, and then what?
There's a woman and she's a dear friend of mine.
She works on vector-borne diseases,
primarily malaria in Guatemala.
She's been working on this problem for 20 years.
She has built the bridge.
The value chain is in place.
She's working with local communities on
ways to eliminate free standing water bodies,
because that of course is where the mosquitoes breed.
Over 20 years, she will,
at the end of her career,
worked in a community the size of 40 square kilometers.
Now her research is absolutely valuable.
It's published primarily in academic journals,
but her footprint at the end of
her career will be 40 square kilometers.
Pinprick in the region itself,
never mind globally what we're facing with
malaria and Zika and others.
What's my point? My point is
that an important component of designing how
you think about addressing
global human solutions
through transdisciplinary research,
has to have
both that community partnership piece, bringing them in,
integrating them using a collective impacts
frameworks to be able to
build a robust bridge that you can
maintain without your head exploding.
Creating dissemination plans in
your research design that allow scalability.
These are not generally academic papers.
They're communication plans through
NGOs and through local communities,
they're informal community engagement.
They're tool kits and case studies
that allow the work that you do in one area to be
moved globally or to
other applicable folks and then the
educational support behind them.
At CU, we have an Earth science
data synthesis center called Earth lab.
One of its charges for
the USGS is to work with land managers up and down
the front range to look at
how climate change is going to be
impacting the land management
decisions they have to make.
The way that they're doing this is really interesting.
They do a concierge service.
They will work one on one with small groups of people,
but every one of those terms into a case study and
a toolkit that explains
what data you need, at what resolution,
why this is important,
where your areas of uncertainty are,
so that anybody interested in this particular question,
maybe it's river management in
Inner Mountain belts, maybe it's fish,
the latest one is trout management in lakes in Montana,
which is great, but it turns out it works in Wyoming.
The fish don't stop at the borders.
If you show land managers in Montana what data
you need and how to get it and
the tools that you need and where the problems are,
and what the research is,
the folks in Wyoming can do it as well.
As you go through your work this afternoon with us,
one of the things we'd like you to pay
attention to is looking at
the partners for the topics that
you'll be taking on in just a few minutes.
The partners that you need in order
to create that value chain.
Really think outside of the box in terms of ways that you
might be able to create ways to scale this,
so that it's more than 40 kilometers.
I said that due respect
Mary because I love the work that she does.
But even she will tell you that
at the end of the day this was important for her,
but not necessarily having
the regional impact that she was hoping for.
We're going to be asking you to start
thinking about the box scaling solutions.
All of that though, requires
the beginning of how do we bring these ideas together,
and for that, I'm going to turn it over to Andy.