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Science Priorities for the Human Dimensions of Global Change
Science Priorities for the Human Dimensions of Global Change Author:Oran R. Young Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Improving Policy Analysis: Research on the Decision-Making Process Scientific research is of little practical value if it does not address the issues that... more » matter to decision makers and reach them in a useful form. Failure to demonstrate practicality can threaten support for research programs whose budgets are justified by policy concerns. That burden of proof must be borne not only by the more directly applicable research (e.g., short-term impact assessments), but also by the fundamental research designed to support applications. Fundamental research should provide decision makers with the information needed for long-term planning, by indicating the extent of existing uncertainties and the rate at which they might be reduced. Concern for the practicality of environmental research was a focal topic in the committee's 1992 report (National Research Council, 1992) and a more recent report prepared for Congress (U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, 1993). Such concern underlies the expansion of the USGCRP to promote integrated assessment and recent planning on the human dimensions component of the USGCRP (Cantor et al., 1993). The practicality of global change research depends on bridging the gap between decision makers, who need answers about how global change might affect their decisions and how their decisions might affect global change, and scientists, who create knowledge about global change that ideally provides the answers that decision makers seek. This gap is a normal consequence of the differing priorities of decision makers and scientists, and it does not resolve itself automatically. We believe that global change research is an area in which the gap is particularly problematic and that it is likely to remain a source of difficulty for the research prog...« less