US climate change program readjusts its strategy

Nature : In a Nature opinion column, Ryan Meyer, a science integration fellow at the California Ocean Science Trust in Oakland, discusses the revamping of a government agency’s strategic plan. For the past 20 years, the US Global Change Research Program has spent more than $30 billion on climate change studies. Although the program has improved our understanding of climate systems, Meyer writes, it has been less successful at providing decision makers with useful information. So the program has added three more objectives: to inform decisions, to sustain assessments, and to communicate and educate. Meyer points out that problems may arise regarding the reallocation of funds among the new priorities and that there may be tradeoffs between the increasing complexity of climate models and the need of policymakers for simplicity. Nevertheless, he applauds the program administrators for “taking such an important conceptual step in the right direction.”