SLIDES: Groundwater Declines, Climate Change and Approaches to Adaptation

Presenter: Katharine Jacobs, Director of the Arizona Water Institute, University of Arizona 37 slide

Arizona Groundwater Management Act: Recent Issues and Future Prospects

26 pages

Improved Drought Planning for Arizona

Presenter: Barbara Morehouse 7 pages and 22 slides Includes bibliographical references Katharine Jacobs is currently the Special Assistant for Policy and Planning, Arizona Department of Water Resources. Barbara Morehouse is Associate Research Scientist at the University of Arizona’s Institute for the Study of Planet Earth. She manages the Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS) project, which is supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Global Programs

Fieldwork as Text and Context: Graduate Students\u27 Narration and Negotiation of Field Experiences Within an Inquiry Community

Fieldwork has historically played an important role within teacher education. Most often these experiences in schools are depicted as sites for developing teachers to gain insight into the practice of teaching. Research into fieldwork as a context for teacher learning, however, has traditionally focused on the learned outcomes, and less on how teachers have experienced and self-described these places of study (Zeichner, 2010, 2012; Cochran-Smith & Zeichner, 2005; Ball & Forzani, 2009). This year-long study explored how students in a literacy education program conceptualized the space of fieldwork as part of their teacher education program. Specifically, the study explored how students made sense of - individually and collectively within an inquiry community -field experiences in relation to coursework, to their own ongoing inquiries, and to their developing identities as teachers. I approached this work from a conceptual framework grounded within three strands: literacy as sociocultural practice; narrative inquiry; and critical feminisms. Data sources included fieldnotes, analytic memos, interview transcripts, and artifact analysis. The research provides insights into how fieldwork is conceptualized as a space of learning within teacher education. During their participation in an inquiry group, and in individual interviews, participants routinely described their goals for fieldwork, their impressions for what was expected of them, and how classroom experiences influenced their perspectives on literacy education, urban education, and teaching more broadly. In particular I analyzed how fieldwork functioned as a space that was both integrated and separated from other spaces of learning in the teacher education program. I critically examined how these narratives were embedded within larger discourses around schooling, teacher education, and school-university partnerships; these stories offer new insights into how fieldwork experiences are integrated into teacher learning, and present a far more complicated image of fieldwork learning than is often reflected in the literature. Furthermore, the collaborative learning within the inquiry group demonstrates the importance of creating spaces for sustained, critical dialogue in connection to field experiences. The study offers new ways of conceptualizing fieldwork that takes into account the inherently relational work of these spaces, highlighting the importance of how fieldwork is integrated and framed within teacher education

Improved Drought Planning for Arizona

Presenter: Barbara Morehouse 7 pages and 22 slides Includes bibliographical references Katharine Jacobs is currently the Special Assistant for Policy and Planning, Arizona Department of Water Resources. Barbara Morehouse is Associate Research Scientist at the University of Arizona’s Institute for the Study of Planet Earth. She manages the Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS) project, which is supported by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Office of Global Programs

Arizona Groundwater Management Act: Recent Issues and Future Prospects

26 pages

Aspirations and common tensions : larger lessons from the third US national climate assessment

Author Posting. © The Author(s), 2015. This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here by permission of Springer for personal use, not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in Climatic Change 135 (2016): 187-201, doi:10.1007/s10584-015-1530-z.The Third US National Climate Assessment (NCA3) was produced by experts in response to the US Global Change Research Act of 1990. Based on lessons learned from previous domestic and international assessments, the NCA3 was designed to speak to a broad public and inform the concerns of policy- and decision-makers at different scales. The NCA3 was also intended to be the first step in an ongoing assessment process that would build the nation’s capacity to respond to climate change. This concluding paper draws larger lessons from the insights gained throughout the assessment process that are of significance to future US and international assessment designers. We bring attention to process and products delivered, communication and engagement efforts, and how they contributed to the sustained assessment. Based on areas where expectations were exceeded or not fully met, we address four common tensions that all assessment designers must confront and manage: between (1) core assessment ingredients (knowledge base, institutional set-up, principled process, and the people involved), (2) national scope and subnational adaptive management information needs, (3) scope, complexity, and manageability, and (4) deliberate evaluation and ongoing learning approaches. Managing these tensions, amidst the social and political contexts in which assessments are conducted, is critical to ensure that assessments are feasible and productive, while its outcomes are perceived as credible, salient, and legitimate

Building a framework for process-oriented evaluation of Regional Climate Outlook Forums

In many regions around the world, Regional Climate Outlook Forums (RCOFs) provide seasonal climate information and forecasts to decision-makers at regional and national levels. Despite having two decades of experience, the forums have not been systematically monitored or evaluated. To address this gap, and to better inform nascent and widespread efforts in climate services, the authors propose a process-oriented evaluation framework derived from literature on decision support and climate communication around the production and use of scientific information.The authors apply this framework to a case study of the Caribbean RCOF (CariCOF), where they have been engaged in a collaborative effort to integrate climate information and decision processes to enhance regional climate resilience. The authors’ examination of the CariCOF shows an evolution toward the use of more advanced and more diverse climate products, as well as greater awareness of user feedback. It also reveals shortfalls of the CariCOF, including a lack of diverse stakeholder participation, a need for better understanding of best practices to tailor information, undeveloped market research of climate products, insufficient experimentation and vetting of communication mechanisms, and the absence of a way to steward a diverse network of regional actors. The authors’ analysis also provides insight that allowed for improvements in the climate services framework to include mechanisms to respond to changing needs and conditions. The authors’ process-oriented framework can serve as a starting point for evaluating RCOFs and other organizations charged with the provision of climate services

Planning for Sustainability in Small Municipalities: The Influence of Interest Groups, Growth Patterns, and Institutional Characteristics

How and why small municipalities promote sustainability through planning efforts is poorly understood. We analyzed ordinances in 451 Maine municipalities and tested theories of policy adoption using regression analysis.We found that smaller communities do adopt programs that contribute to sustainability relevant to their scale and context. In line with the political market theory, we found that municipalities with strong environmental interests, higher growth, and more formal governments were more likely to adopt these policies. Consideration of context and capacity in planning for sustainability will help planners better identify and benefit from collaboration, training, and outreach opportunities

Progress and challenges in incorporating climate change information into transportation research and design

The vulnerability of our nation\u27s transportation infrastructure to climate change and extreme weather is now well documented and the transportation community has identified numerous strategies to potentially mitigate these vulnerabilities. The challenges to the infrastructure sector presented by climate change can only be met through collaboration between the climate science community, who evaluate what the future will likely look like, and the engineering community, who implement our societal response. To facilitate this process, the authors asked: what progress has been made and what needs to be done now in order to allow for the graceful convergence of these two disciplines? In late 2012, the Infrastructure and Climate Network (ICNet), a National Science Foundation-supported research collaboration network, was established to answer that question. This article presents examples of how the ICNet experience has shown the way toward a new generation of innovation and cross-disciplinary research, challenges that can be address by such collaboration, and specific guidance for partnerships and methods to effectively address complex questions requiring a cogeneration of knowledge