Climate change is a pressing challenge for science and society in the 21st century. Adaptations to climate change require a diverse and boundary-spanning workforce that can collaborate to create actionable science that can address the many environmental and social challenges that are occurring and will likely grow. How can we prepare graduate researchers to work effectively in this complicated future? We address these challenges through creation of an interdisciplinary graduate training program in Climate Adaptation Science that embeds MS and PhD student researchers in a cycle of co-creation of actionable science with many non-academic partners, including agencies, NGOs, and industry. The program includes students from 9 departments and 20 degree programs, including ecology, engineering, mathematics, sociology, economics, geography, and other relevant fields, who intern with partner organizations that have need for climate adaptation science and action. The students work together in a year-long research studio that is informed by their internships and other experiences, and they create communication plans to guide development of individualized suites of communication capabilities. We report on the structure, development, and initial assessments of this program and its impacts on graduate students, non-academic partners, and faculty.
Results/Conclusions
We have found that agencies, NGOs, and businesses generally welcome opportunities to mentor graduate students for future careers at the science-policy-management interface and to collaborate in research. The collaborations begun through internships and research studio projects have benefited non-academic partner organizations, have contributed chapters to graduate student theses and dissertations, and are spawning new research directions and collaborations for program faculty. Use of individual communication plans, supplemented with media and other communication training, is improving students’ confidence in their ability to communicate, collaborate, and share information across disciplinary and workforce boundaries, as well as diversifying their communication toolkits and resulting in some novel presentation formats for students’ research and other experiences.