Abstract

Climate variability and change significantly influences the health, prosperity, and well-being of individuals, societies, and the environment. For the United States this has been demonstrated, most recently, by several high impact events such as the 1997–98 El Nino event, the hurricane seasons of 2004 and 2005, the ongoing drought since 1999 in the Southwest, falling Great Lake levels, and the worst drought in 100 years in the Southeast (2007). Over the past two decades there has been significant progress in understanding longer-term climate patterns that influence these events, such as the El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO), the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), and the Arctic Oscillation (AO). Increasingly, attention is being paid to the cumulative impacts of regional climatic events driven by decadal-scale modulations of these phenomena.

Much recent research has shown that enabling effective responses to environmental variability and change requires knowledge assessments at both the global scale and at the appropriate scales of decision making i.e., the region and the locale (NRC 1999; Clark et al. 2001). As identified at the federal level and in academia, there is a need for credible, unbiased assessments of the status and trends of environmental patterns and processes (US Congress 1994). At the same time there are calls for more and better structured processes to identify, assess, and meet national, regional, private, and local climate-related needs, and to foster the timely adoption and effective use of commercially valuable information and technology throughout the US economy (US Congress 1998; US Congress 2007).

This paper outlines the development and evolution of a long-term US-based interdisciplinary program focusing on climate impacts assessments and regional and local decision support: the Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments Program (hereafter RISA). The RISA program has existed for over ten years and tangible lessons may begin to be drawn from the experiences of the RISA teams and from program management. Many studies or even “assessments of assessments” aim at providing new frameworks, usually idealized, but offer little on how the assessment itself originated, is organized, and sustained. Put differently, knowing what to do is not the same as doing it. The RISAs have developed as decentralized scientific applications and policy experiments (Brunner 1996) providing traceable accounts of successful federal–state and local partnerships in interdisciplinary research, climate impacts assessment, and decision support.