AGU Workshops on Impactful Priorities for Climate Change Solutions

Climate change and its impact on society and the environment are some of the most pressing issues facing our nation and the world today. To address these challenges, the American Geophysical Union, one of the largest geoscience professional societies will collect ideas on potential ways to increase our understanding of processes and develop creative approaches to help combat and potentially mitigate the effects of climate change brought on by extreme weather events, changing weather patterns and landscapes, sea level rise, migration of species both on land and in the ocean, among others.

Goals are to provide a prospectus of possible solutions and/or mitigations, with an emphasis on those subjects that would have a positive impact and be able to deliver impacts on on a time frame of 2 to 3-years. An aggressive program of outreach to geoscience community members, working groups, and geoscience disciplinary executive teams will be carried out.

A significant component of these efforts will be on collecting ideas and thoughts from early career geoscience researchers and members of commonly marginalized and underrepresented groups. Broader impacts of the activity include development and delivery of potential, workable approaches to better understanding climate change with a framework of possible means of slowing or mitigating negative impacts on society and the environment.

Input from marginalized communities and those that have not had a strong voice in decisions made by policy makers and that commonly suffer impacts from decisions on infrastructure and degradation of environmental conditions will be solicited and incorporated into the final report.

The negative impacts of climate change on the environment and society are serious concerns for the environment as well as populations and governments. The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is a major professional society of over 60,000 geoscientists. It will use this vast array of geoscientists via its membership and others to contribute to ideating possible solutions to issues related to climate change.

To do this AGU is holding a series of workshops, discussion groups, and surveys to identify and catalog ideas and solutions to climate related natural process issues where earth, atmosphere, ocean, polar, and geospace science plays a major role and for which deliverables with major impacts can be generated within two to three years. The AGU will accomplish this task by convening executive committees, working groups, and its professional society members to crowdsource ideas and possible avenues of attack and research to fill gaps in knowledge to allow potential solutions to move forward while still preserving precious earth environments.

AGU is putting the generation of this information and its community’s input as a priority with the goal of producing a report to be made public and submitted to the National Science Foundation.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.