New Alliances

Effective strategies for reducing climate and other disaster related risks will require new alliances between groups that have not traditionally worked in close collaboration. Understanding the likely hazards associated with climate change or other earth systems requires rapid transmission of basic scientific insights into operational contexts as such insights emerge. Equally importantly, understanding how changes in the dynamics of natural systems may affect risk requires not just natural science information but also the integration of social science insights and field and operational realities. Alliances for communication and the development of shared understanding must, as a result, be opened between the global climate and hazards communities and communities of actors focused at the micro-level on development, financing and related agendas. Challenges exist at multiple levels and across scales. Alliances will need to cross these boundaries.

Our approach to the development of new alliances focuses on identifying key points of entry where actors at different scales and often in different disciplines have immediate and tangible reasons for working together. Global experience with networks indicates that they thrive where the objectives and purposes of working together are clearly focused on immediate and tangible activities. Such activities form the core operational nuclei around which collaboration can be initiated. Once such nuclei are well established, information sharing, knowledge development, analysis, advocacy and other activities often evolve. Without the nuclei, however, networks and alliances rapidly dissipate. 

Given the above, our program actively seeks to identify tangible activities where collaboration with new sets of key actors across a spectrum of scales is possible. This involves collaboration on communication and translation of climate and risk information, shared development of methodologies, collaboration on field pilot projects and joint analysis of basic scientific information.