By Philip Mote
The Pacific Northwest region recently completed and released its regional assessment report with a press conference and seven public meetings around the region.  For the most part things went smoothly.  We hope that other participants in the National Assessment have a similarly favorable experience as their reports are released, and we outline here some of the details in case they are of any value in planning.

Release
With able assistance from the UW News and Information Office, word of the report was widely dispersed on TV, on radio, and in newspapers.  Press coverage on the day of the release (November 9) was generous around the region, including several large front-page articles.  The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the Portland Oregonian, and two other newspapers also wrote editorials playing up our theme that the region's government agencies are ill-prepared to manage natural resources in a changing climate.

Public events
Beginning the day after the report was released, various of the authors traveled around the region presenting the report in a 40-minute, general-audience presentation, mostly in the afternoons.  In Portland, about 75 attended; in Salem, a much smaller town, about 25 attended; some drove more than an hour.  In Boise, an audience comprised mostly of water resources managers (50 in total, plus some watching via compressed video in Idaho Falls) heard a much more technical presentation.  An evening event in Boise drew only a handful, but an evening event in Seattle the next day drew 85.  Another small evening event in the Tri-Cities (Pasco, WA) had disappointing turnout, but one attendee drove more than two hours from Spokane to see our presentation.  Finally, the 1999 events drew to a close with a presentation to a very well-informed audience of about 50 in Olympia.  At none of the events was there anything approaching a “hostile -- question; in fact, the most insistent critic we encountered was a retired state legislator who took us to task for not pushing the “solutions -- to global climate change.

To publicize the events, we relied on UW News and Information to get the events on calendars published in newspapers, and we found stakeholders and other allies all over the region with extensive e-mail networks.

Production
Our full report was 110 pages, and the summary (a separate document) was 12 pages. The Edit-Design Center (EDC) at the University of Washington (UW) was employed to oversee the production of the report and the layout and design of the summary.  To save money, I did the layout of the full report myself using LaTeX, free typesetting software that's a favorite among scientists.  The production was hampered by the fact that the UW forced us to go with the lowest bidder for the printing, and EDC staff ended up spending much more time overseeing the printing process as a result, and even so the quality suffered.  Total costs came to $24,900.

Distribution
We initially printed 1500 copies of the full report and 2000 copies of the summary.  At the time of writing (December 9, one month after the release), we have distributed 550 copies of the full report and 1360 copies of the summary.  Most of these went to people already in our database (including National Assessment participants), or were distributed at the public meetings, but a fair number were mailed to people in response to one of the 340 unsolicited requests that came in by telephone and e-mail.  The summary is also available on our web site as a pdf file, and we have no way of knowing how many people have downloaded it.

For more information, contact:
Philip Mote, JISAO/SMA Climate Impacts Group; Box 354235, Univ. of Wash. Seattle WA 98195; phone (206) 616-5346; fax (206) 616-5775