Use-Inspired Climate Change Solutions: A TOS-ASLO Workshop Series

The Oceanography Society (TOS) and the Associated Sciences for Limnology and Oceanography (ASLO), the two largest professional societies of aquatic scientists in the US will hold a series of community-driven information collecting events to identify interdisciplinary and convergent challenges the nation and world are facing due to climate change. A focus will be to crowdsource research directions and solutions to mitigate the threats posed by climate change in such a way that major impacts to society and the economy will be realized within a quick time frame.

Outreach to the limnology and oceanographic communities will be spearheaded by a task force of thought leaders with a membership reflecting diverse interdisciplinary expertise, gender diversity, career stage, and ethnicity. Activities will be professionally facilitated and will be tied to identifying solutions that target sustainability science. Results of the community outreach will include a synthesis of workshop/communication venue results as well as the mining of information from recent professional society abstracts to augment the in-person/virtual conversations and input.

Broader impacts of the work will be to surface transformational, global ideas that accelerate use-inspired, entrepreneurial, and nature-based solutions to the threats the nation and world are facing due to a warming world which is driving climate change. As such, the potential societal impacts are great. Other impacts include aquatic science community building; support of the development of early-career scientists; enhancing interdisciplinary, inter-agency, and international collaborations; and providing vehicles for connections between government, academic, and the private sector that link scientists in developed and developing nations in accelerating the design and implementation of use-inspired climate change solutions.

Climate change and its impacts on the environment, society, patterns of land use, locations of communities, etc. are serious problems facing the nation and the world. The two US premier professional societies of aquatic scientists (The Oceanographic Society and the Associated Sciences of Limnology and Oceanography) will use their network of thousands of scientists to obtain input and crowdsource ideas for solutions to tractable issues being caused by climate change.

These professional societies will jointly hold meetings, surveys, and conversations with members, nationally and internationally, to identify possible areas in which convergent science that crosses disciplines and stakeholder groups and where major advances in a short time frame can be made. The two professional societies will generate a report that will be 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.