Supporting local adaptation through the co-production of climate information: An evaluation of collaborative research processes and outcomes

Abstract

Water for the Seasons was a five-year collaborative research project which aimed to assess the climate resiliency of the Truckee-Carson River System, a snow-fed river system in the western United States. The collaborative research design featured iterative interactions involving an interdisciplinary research team and local stakeholders that produced climate science information identified by stakeholders as necessary to support adaptation to climate-induced water supply variability. This information included plausible climate scenarios to test the resiliency of the river system and models simulating hydrologic results to examine changes in water availability. In this paper, we present formative and summative evaluation data collected over the course of the project to determine the extent to which this collaborative research project met stakeholders’ climate science information needs. Results indicate that over a five-year period, the project: 1) co-produced new climate science information to support local climate adaptation; 2) consistently engaged stakeholders in research that facilitated social learning to identify innovative strategies to adapt water management; 3) provided iterative interactions between stakeholders and researchers to ensure resulting information services were useful to stakeholders; 4) combined diverse, practical stakeholder knowledge with rigorous scientific research to co-produce legitimate climate science information; and 5) effectively utilized Extension as a boundary organization to design, implement, and evaluate collaborative research processes and outcomes. Further empirical work is necessary to continue testing and standardizing metrics that illuminate collaborative research successes and failures, and to identify best practices that guide future collaborations to co-produce climate science information.