Center for Marine Biodiversity and Conservation

In the field of climate change adaptation and mitigation studies, as in many other areas of Western science, there has often been a tendency to overlook and exclude marginalized populations in the course of scientific research (Forman and Pellow 2019). This can lead to incomplete knowledge and flawed solutions to complex problems such as climate change, which requires an understanding of the interconnectedness of ecology and society (Lubchenco et al. 2016). Close partnership with communities and resource user groups can expose those inaccuracies and enable better adaptation and mitigation strategies (Miller 2018; Mitchell 2020). A diversity of perspectives leads to a diversity of solutions (Redmond 2014), a critical tool in adapting to climate change. The purpose of this capstone project is to encourage researchers to develop a holistic perspective of the problem of climate change and give them the tools to incorporate community knowledge into their research and proposed solutions in an equitable manner. The end result, a training for researchers on engaging in equitable, collaborative work with communities, can be found here: https://humanecology.ucsd.edu/cooperative-research-for-climate-resilience/. There is no similar training at Scripps Institution of Oceanography, and will be implemented by the faculty working group “Connecting Scripps to Communities.