AGU Thriving Earth Exchange
The American Geophysical Union (AGU) has 62,000 scientist members. AGU launched its new Thriving Earth Exchange (TEX) program recently. Its list of projects is growing rapidly. TEX matches scientist specialists with citizen science communities that need scientific guidance, breaking down the “town vs gown” barrier that has traditionally separated some ivory towers from the challenges of their local communities. Granite City, pictured below, is one early town project.
The TEX program matches scientists with community leaders, connecting scientists, communities, and sponsors, and enabling them to work together to develop solutions, primarily focused on developing early warning capacity to address the secondary impacts of climate change. TEX announced in October a Water Partnership to empower local communities worldwide to manage their water resources.
The City of Oakland is one of the AGU-TEX model projects, also named a Resilient City. Victoria Salinas was appointed Oakland Chief Resilience Officer (CRO). She will lead Oakland to plan, prepare for, and mitigate both acute disasters and long-term challenges, such as rising sea levels. She will be responsible for implementing the Oakland 2012 Climate Action Plan.
Oakland is working with ICLEI, founded in 1990 as the International Council for Local Environmental Initiatives, now known simply as Local Governments for Sustainability.
ICLEI Global is an international association of local governments, national and regional local government organizations that have made a commitment to sustainable development. ICLEI has its US Headquarters in Oakland, which faces its share of challenges, from California’s ongoing drought, to earthquakes to concern about sea level rise.
The Thriving Earth Exchange advances citizen science by providing tools to design and launch a range of projects to develop early warning systems to address secondary effects of climate change, including drought, sea level rise, food and water shortages, fires, storm surge preparedness, and resilient systems to cope with unpredicted emergencies. The question, “What forms of learning media can raise individual and social network awareness?” is followed by setting benchmarks to assess progress of a community-driven learning process, developing templates for cross-project knowledge-sharing and “experiential learning,” testing multiple alternative methods to present and visualize information, and argument design.
Rajul (Raj) Pandya, Director of the AGU (American Geophysical Union) Thriving Earth Exchange (or TEX), aims to move beyond telling people about science to start listening and including citizen scientists in the science community. He believes that diversity enhances science, but only when diverse questions and approaches are as welcome as diverse backgrounds. Raj is a champion of TEX, having started the Denver, Colorado TEX program to test low-cost approaches to measuring hazardous chemicals that enter homes though basements (e.g. PCE and Radon) while at NCAR (National Center for Atmospheric Research). This pilot has significant implications: the cost of monitoring a home goes from $100 to $8, making monitoring more accessible for many communities. Data collected in Denver will be used to target widespread remediation. Raj Pandya convinced AGU that pilots, such as this Denver project, could be initiated in many locations, with each successful pilot serving as an exemplar for a program network that could learn from the lessons of the pilot to extend its successes to global implementation.
