Foreword

From the beginning, the Regional Integrated Sciences and Assessments (RISA) program has been an experiment. Unlike other experiments in climate-related services and in connecting science with decision-making, it has survived and thrived since 1995, despite numerous challenges. A partnership between the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), universities and stakeholders, RISA is focused on place-specific problems and solutions and explores the space between research and decision-making. It is designed to respond in a flexible way to the chain of requests for climate-related information at multiple time scales that has risen from regions and sectors across the United States.

RISA's origins lie in the vision of a few important leaders in the federal government and in academia; they include J. Michael (Mike) Hall, the former director of the Office of Global Programs at NOAA and a widely influential visionary in the U.S. government; Edward (Ed) Miles, the director of the first RISA, the Climate Impacts Group at the University of Washington; and Claudia Nierenberg, who served as the first program director for RISA. Of course, there have been literally dozens of visionary leaders associated with the program since the early days, but without the contributions of these three people, the program would not be what it is today. A strong vision from the beginning, a flexible management approach, and strong central coordination and leadership have all played a major role in building the program.

The 11 RISA program "experiments" across the country are linked to a multi-institutional network managed centrally in the Climate Program Office at NOAA. Each RISA has evolved in response to the interests and capabilities of Principal Investigators (PIs) within the partner universities as well as to the interests and needs of its regional stakeholders. Because there are so many issues related to climate impacts, vulnerability assessment, and building relevant decision-support products over a range of time and space scales, there is a need for multiple different approaches across the United States.

Clearly, the seed funding provided by NOAA has provided incentives to take the experiments in particular directions, but in virtually all cases, a highly leveraged program has evolved that includes a range of different local, regional, and federal funding sources and partnerships. This flexibility and diversity is one of the institutional strengths of RISA. Although the program has always been underfunded, RISA is widely acknowledged as a success story in providing decision-relevant science products. It has been a constant challenge to maintain and/or grow the program over time. Program funding has been threatened for a variety of internal (agency) and external reasons, but it has continued to provide incentives for interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary work that has been truly groundbreaking. In some cases, the interdisciplinary teams have been together for almost 20 years, and in all cases the opportunity to do longitudinal studies and engage with stakeholders over years-to-decades has been instrumental in building an understanding of both the art and science of connecting science and decision-making.

The fact that each of the RISAs has different topical focus areas and different strengths in engaging with stakeholders is an important part of the success of RISA as a system, and there are many examples of how the system itself has evolved as an institution over time. Not only are there far more collaborative projects across the RISA network now than there were historically, but there are also purposeful efforts to design the research in ways that fill both social and physical science gaps in the whole network. This approach is unprecedented in federal science programs and likely has no parallel globally, though there are now many examples of science networks that emulate portions of this approach.

Although there is an ongoing debate within the RISA community about where on the "science-to-action" continuum the work should focus, part of the rationale has always been to experiment with the space between research and applications, building an understanding of the role of science in policy and the role of academia and government investments in building science-based solutions. In building local communities of practice that are linked to a truly functional network of practitioners, there have been contributions to the careers of researchers and students who have been funded by the program as well as to the careers of external stakeholders who have been drawn into the experiment.

Building communication and planning tools, reporting back to the larger RISA community about successes and failures, and a significant dose of self-reflection have been the hallmarks of the program. In fact, self-reflection has been strongly encouraged. This willingness to openly expose weaknesses and identify the needs for improvement is extremely unusual in government-sponsored programs. There has been significant stress underlying all of the progress that has been made, but in many cases that stress has provided for enhanced learning opportunities (see also, RISA in a Nutshell).

RISA contributions in the national and global context: climate services, assessments, and adaptation

Given the well-documented observation that climate variability and climate change are already causing costly damages in every region and sector of the United States and the globe, and that there are many unrealized economic opportunities as well (National Climate Assessment, 2014), it has been clear to most of the climate community for two decades that climate information services at multiple time scales (subseasonal to interannual to decadal and beyond) are needed. The need for climate services mirrors the need for weather information but with longer time scales and larger consequences. Despite this fact, building a U.S. climate service has been very controversial. Without explicitly intending to do so, RISA has emerged as one of several highly leveraged attempts to fill in the gaps associated with the lack of a climate service in the United States. It also provides a good model for regional climate service activities that could be developed by other countries.

RISA has already influenced thinking outside of the U.S. borders through contributions of many of its PIs and stakeholders to the International Panel on Climate Change reports, through international colleagues who have closely followed the development of RISA-funded knowledge production, and through investments by the United States in international adaptation/resilience initiatives. For example, the influence of RISA contributions can be seen in the reports of the United States to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the development of the Global Framework for Climate Services and the September 23, 2014 Presidential Executive Order on Climate Resilient International Development. Lessons learned have also influenced the evolution of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society, the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research, and most recently, the framing of the NOAA International Research and Applications Program.

Many of the social science and process findings of RISA mirror those of other climate-focused organizations elsewhere, including the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO), Australian Government Science Program and the UKCIP (the UK Climate Impacts Program). Examples are: the need for building trusted relationships between scientists and stakeholders over time, building salience, credibility and legitimacy of products and processes in partnership with stakeholders, enhancing utility of information through co-production of knowledge, and boundary spanning activities. In addition, RISA-related findings have been extremely visible in advice to the US Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and in multiple NRC panels (there are at least 15 reports where RISA players and findings were influential, including the five America's Climate Choices reports).

The RISA network has also made very explicit contributions to all three US National Climate Assessments, particularly certain Synthesis and Assessment products (e.g., SAP 5.3) of the Bush Administration, and the regional components of the Third National Climate Assessment (NCA3). The contributions to the NCA3 were very substantial; RISA program managers, PIs, staff, and students played a role in virtually all of the eight regional assessment teams as well as in developing technical support documents and regional foundation reports later published as a book series by Island Press. All of the RISAs have been engaged in the discussions of the sustained approach to assessment and several are members of the NCA engagement network.

Science support for adaptation/resilience decisions is in great demand. Most of what the RISAs do, whether it is in support of agriculture, fire management, urban planning or water resources management, contributes to resilience- mostly direct investments in applied science, adaptation tools and services, climate-related communications, science translation in support of specific sectoral interests, social network analysis, and analysis of the effectiveness of decision support.

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