By Tom Wilbanks, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

A frequent challenge in our lives is taking something that we must do and turning it into something that we should do. The Global Change Research Act of 1990 says that the federal government "shall prepare and submit to the President and the Congress" an assessment of potential consequences of climate change for the United States, not just as a one-time exercise but as a longer-term continuing commitment. How, then, can we make this process truly useful to our country as we mobilize to deal with one of the most profound environmental issues for the next several generations?

As the current national assessment was being conceived early in 1997, Jerry Melillo laid out a dramatic vision of how it might in fact be useful as well as responsive. His vision was of a strikingly new approach to environmental policy assessment in the United States, grounded in dialogues at the regional/local level between regional experts and regional stakeholders: farmers, ranchers, local business people, local government leaders, local interest groups, and citizens at large. Activated by regional workshops, this consultation would raise the level of awareness of local citizens of climate change issues, invite them to consider vulnerabilities to possible impacts, and then identify the major issues at the regional scale from the point of view of citizens and voters. Out of this democratic process of information exchange would come a picture of vulnerabilities of our country to impacts of climate change and variability -- not merely as a function of scenarios or local climate change forecasts that could result simply in arguments about assumptions but as a strong, robust set of views from the grassroots across the country. Moreover, this would not be a one-time process.

 The regional workshops and subsequent regional assessments would catalyze the development of stakeholder networks that would support a continuing process of information exchange, education, and outreach related to climate change issues. In fact, this approach might well serve as a model for addressing other thorny environmental policy issues in the United States in the future. As you know, this vision has since been expanded to address key sectors as well as regions.

While the production of the first report to the U.S. Congress speeds along this year, all of us with a commitment to the national assessment vision want to do our best to assure a strong parallel effort directed at outreach, education, and stakeholder interactions. This effort is not unrelated to the first national report, of course; we believe that by drawing on the knowledge bases of stakeholders and local/regional experts the assessment will be stronger than if it were based only on the knowledge base of national experts and modelers. But for the longer term, in many ways the outreach component of a comprehensive national climate change impact assessment program is an issue in its own right, essential for fulfilling the Congressional mandate, which is why it is getting special attention in this issue of Acclimations.

What we know is that a comprehensive national program in the years to come is going to be based solidly in research and development to improve our knowledge of impacts and vulnerabilities and the analytical tools available to answer such questions. To be effective, it will also include continuing structures for interaction with regional, sectoral, and national stakeholders, and it will use them to involve a range of U.S. citizens that mirrors the complexity of our democratic approaches to national decision-making.

As this issue indicates, it needs one further component as well. Broad public participation only works well when it is well-informed, which means that R&D on the one hand and participation on the other need to be linked by effective information dissemination and education. And this linkage needs to consist not just of top-down teaching and mentoring but also of responsiveness to bottom-up questions and concerns -- what the current national assessment is calling an "inverse" approach to vulnerability assessment.

A big question for the future, however, is which of these functions should be performed by the federal government. Clearly, the government has traditionally taken the lead in supporting the R&D component, and there are many reasons why it should continue to play a major role. On the other hand, stakeholder participation and much of the information dissemination are likely to be more credible and sustainable if they are separated from government funding and management. Who will play these roles and how will they be supported?

Unless we come up with some effective strategies, and soon, the future of the outreach, educational, and stakeholder participation aspect of the national program is going to be in jeopardy. Why soon? First, because we need to capitalize on the momentum from the regional workshops and deliver on our promises to regional and sectoral stakeholders and, second, because important decisions about the long-term national program are likely to be made during this year, since some of the current mechanisms will go out of business when the first assessment report is completed. As you read this issue, we invite you to think not only about the potentials of outreach strategies but also about possible mechanisms for implementing them, and we hope to hear from you about your ideas.