From Research to Action: Building Partnerships for Climate Solutions
Most formal training prepares researchers to solve problems deeply within specific disciplines and academic contexts. However, today’s climate challenges depend on a different set of requirements: integration of knowledge across disciplines, coordination across sectors, action to address multiple stakeholder needs and priorities, and above all, creativity and resilience. Success in these areas relies on creating lasting partnerships and collaborations that endure and grow stronger over time leading to increased trust, creative problem solving, and greater impact.
The Nature and People Action CoLab is building these partnerships and working extensively across disciplines, sectors, and contexts to ensure that nature-based solutions are not only scientifically rigorous, but that they also are grounded in and attend to the cultures and priorities of the people and places they are designed to serve.
Below we describe several partnerships – both budding and fully fledged – that embody this within our work.
Some example partnerships include working with:
The Nature Conservancy and Wildlife Conservation Society to understand how scientists learn to collaborate across disciplinary, sectoral, and cultural lines during professional practice and how that learning can be better supported in the Science for Nature and People Partnership (SNAPP) Program.
The City of Boulder Climate Solutions Team and the Cool Boulder Campaign to examine how municipal climate campaigns build capacity for collective action across partner organizations.
The World Wildlife Foundation to synthesize information around indicators of ‘integrity and connectivity’ in freshwater, marine, and terrestrial ecosystems to build a Nature Health Index.
The Upper Gunnison River Water Conservancy District, the Nature Conservancy, Bureau of Land Management, and the US Forest Service to co-develop research around the efficacy of low-tech restoration efforts (zeedyks) in the Gunnison Watershed.
Across all of this work, a common thread is NPAC's approach: we co-design, co-laborate, co-lect, co-ordinate. We partner. We do not do this work in isolation. Our partnerships are core and central to our work, and we want to begin our official tenure as the NPAC center by recognizing these partnerships and their incredible value. So in closing, a HUGE THANK YOU to our amazing partners. You are the backbone of this center. We love working with you and look forward to collaborating for many, many years to come.
