Building institutional partnerships to address climate change adaptations and regional environmental change

Background/Question/Methods

Regional environmental problems have been addressed in a wide variety of ways ranging from the creation of cooperative pollution control districts to mediation and binding legal agreements.  Climate change adaptation presents a new and unique challenge to regions because the impacts will be felt across diverse ecosystems and across many different economic sectors.  Climate impacts also still remain largely outside outside federal and (most) state environmental regulations and in many cases are uncertain.  Despite these issues, cities, non-profits, governmental, and academic organizations are becoming increasingly engaged in approaches to address regional change.

Results/Conclusions

At the University of Colorado, we have developed an approach to improving the coordination and ties among institutions and working in collaboration with federal, state, and non-profit organizations to begin to address climate change adaptation on a regional scale.   This approach is called a ‘collaboratory’ and in this talk, I describe the application of collaborative institutional relationships in SW Colorado and specifically how these arrangements are helping build partnerships to address climate change adaptation. This particular case study involves researchers from CU Boulder, Fort Lewis College, federal land management agencies (both the Bureau of Land Management and the US Forest Service), and a regional non-profit organization called the Mountain Studies Institute.  Through these arrangements, CU and these partner organizations have developed new educational outreach programs and research efforts aimed at providing both information and decision support tools to regional planners.  The effort has not been without challenges, most notably the challenges of securing resources to pursue collaborative efforts that involve both science and planning.  None-the-less, these arrangements offer one example of institutional collaboration to address emerging regional problems and highlight one way in which research universities can better engage with regional stakeholders.