Who Is This Site Built For?
This web site is built for those actively involved in climate-change problem solving - for example, urban planners, water resource managers, regional policy makers, public health officials, academics, and a variety of scientists. The site is built on the premise that teams of people focused on complex problems are most likely to develop usable solutions paths. Complex problem solving requires a sharing of information and a management of competing factors. Therefore, the site is built to support problem solving - the collection, analysis, evaluation, and use of knowledge. The intent is that if the information used in successful strategies for problem solving is collected and categorized in a shared environment, then the trans-disciplinary expertise will be captured. Then that expert-described information will be available for others. This addresses the following goals:
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Improving the use of climate information in planning and resource management
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Exchanging of knowledge across many types of expertise
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Accelerating our ability to reduce the risks of climate change
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Establishing the practice of incorporating climate-change knowledge into planning and resource management
The target audience, therefore, are the professionals and practitioners who are willing to invest some time in marking the information they find useful, sharing their analyses of this information, and sharing the results of there projects. By doing this, the next problem should be easier to solve; it is not required that each team starts over from the beginning.
The information collected at this site is publicly viewable and searchable. If you are officially involved in a project and a registered user of the site, then you can add new resources, initiate and contribute to analyses, and edit the existing information to provide descriptions from your point of view. You can report if you found a particular resources to be especially useful, or you can report why a resource is not as useful as it might appear to be. You can let those in urban planning know that a resource is also useful in public health. You can also correct mistakes, so that the next person doesn't waste their time finding the same mistake. We have tried to make this easy, but it is a hard problem; hence, some work and commitment is involved.