Making Science Results Count for Practitioners: Our contribution to the Fire in the Earth Congress
By Doan Ho, Climate-KIC
Last month, my Climate-KIC colleague Dr Saskia Keesstra and I journeyed to Caceres, a sunbaked UNESCO World Heritage town of 100,000 in the remote region of Spanish Extremadura. I say remote because all trains were cancelled to the entire region for 6 days a mere 3 days before I needed them, which meant that I took a scenic 4-hour bus from Madrid after my Amsterdam-Madrid flight. Saskia was already in Valencia and opted to test out her new camper van by driving the 650 kilometres cross-country.
We met in Caceres for the third international Congress on Fire in the Earth System, a conference on all things concerning fire, including its effects on land management, society and economy, politics, as well as soil and water. Despite the particularities of physically getting to the region, the conference was extremely well organised. Conferences of this sort always seek to create synergies between researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and citizens. And they always try to contribute to new approaches to X subject – simply insert fire research in our case. But the uniqueness of the location created a group of attendees who really wanted to be there, instead of using the conference as CV fodder, something you might not get if you had held the conference in Madrid. The conversations were memorable, fruitful, and very honest.
Saskia and I came to Caceres to give a presentation about exploring the crucial role of stakeholder integration in forest and wildfire management within the context of the Horizon Europe INFORMA project. The latest scientific findings indicate that improved sustainable forest management practices can double forests’ climate change mitigation impact by 2050. INFORMA is attempting to deploy a holistic approach to bridge the gap between practitioners working on the ground, scientists, policymakers, carbon markets, and civil society at large.
Generally, a lot of research is being funded and undertaken, but the trick is then translating those quantitative results into concrete policy recommendations for governments, as well as translating science into something to which practitioners and citizens can relate.
If an ecologist spoke about their work to a geneticist, they would hardly understand. You can imagine the even larger gulf of understanding when the ecologist speaks to the average Joe or their mayor. This is where ‘science brokerage’ comes in, a counterintuitive fancy term social scientists use to describe methods to translate very technical science to non-technical people. What social scientists mean is that insight of non-scientists during the actual research process is crucial to making science practical.
When the whole “quadruple helix” is well-informed and involved in research from the very beginning, the societal and government willingness to uptake new policy recommendations or new scientific results is increased. The quadruple helix is once again an obfuscating social science term for the overlapping interactions between four sectors: 1) universities, 2) industry, 3) government/policymakers, and 4) civil society/NGOs.
We gave a comprehensive overview of INFORMA’s process of using stakeholder mapping and stakeholder engagement in shaping forest management practices and wildfire resilience. The first step we took in INFORMA was stakeholder mapping, which is a process used to guide knowledge transfer and integration of research into society. Who do we know, how, and to what extent? Only when we can map that, can we know how to involve these actors into the research and in policy implementation later. This is one way to create buy-in for the research and the subsequent policy recommendations from forest owners, forest practitioners, policymakers, and carbon certification providers.
Step two was creating workshops with these aforementioned actors to build a relationship, create the communication channels, create that buy-in, and receive crucial feedback for our research in the real world. The workshops were also meant to foster conversations between this quadruple helix interested in forest management and forest carbon certification so they can learn from each other’s perspectives and pain points. Step three will be creating working groups that meet every 6 weeks to road test the carbon certification innovations that our research has provided using the relationships that we’ve built in step one and two.
After a lot of sitting in an auditorium and attempting to wrap my head around very technical LIDAR maps and chemistry science – as a social scientist, my brain was melting a bit – we were treated to a lot of cardio. The wonderful conference organisers brought us to Monfrague National Park, one of Europe’s last unspoiled ecosystems; the Jerte Valley where I bought 15 kilos of local cherries; and a few gorgeous peaks in the Sierra de las Villuercas. As you can imagine, the physical scientists and geologists were quite agile hauling themselves up and down the mountainsides. Note to social scientists (read: me): spend less time at your desk and do more cardio if you want to keep up.
