The AMS Summer Policy Colloquium: Accelerating and Magnifying the Broader Impacts of Science

For more than half a century, the National Science Foundation has been funding proposals of extraordinary intellectual merit, transforming American science in the process. For the past two decades, NSF has added “broader impacts” to its evaluation criteria in an effort to expand and accelerate societal benefit from such research.

Historically, the societal benefit of weather-, water-, and climate predictions has been restricted primarily by shortcomings in the forecasts themselves – large uncertainties in projecting how atmospheric temperature, wind, and precipitation per se might vary over time. However, as NSF, other federal agencies, governments and academic researchers worldwide made great strides in predictive skill, public-policy issues– with respect to hazard mitigation, environmental protection, and the development of food, energy, and water resources, but also with respect to policy for science and science for policy more generally – have emerged as the limiting factors in realizing public benefit. It’s increasingly important that geoscientists be as disciplined in their approach to policy as they are to their science (understanding what it means, for example, to “stay in the proper lane” – providing input on the implications of alternative policy options versus making actual recommendations).

The AMS Summer Policy Colloquium was conceived in the year 2000 to meet this need. The Colloquium helps future leaders in the geosciences and derived services develop a fundamental understanding of the policy process. It borrows its title from, and is modeled after, the successful NCAR Summer Colloquium (focusing on technical matters). Each year, the AMS brings a group of 30-40 early- to mid-career scientists, drawn from government agencies, the private-sector, and universities, to Washington DC for ten days. Participants are given preassigned reading. They meet with members of Congress, Congressional staffers, and policy officials from the White House, the State Department, and other elements of the Executive Branch, as well as leaders from NGO’s such as the National Academies for Science, AAAS, the World Bank, etc. They work through group exercises and case studies.

More than 600 scientists have been through the program to date. Of these, more than a third participate as graduate students – selected competitively by AMS and funded by a succession of NSF grants. Over two decades, many Colloquium participants have gone on to apply for and win Congressional Science Fellowships, and subsequently stay on Capitol Hill. Others have risen through the ranks of their respective institutions and the geosciences community, and now serve as leaders in our community – university department chairs, agency heads, corporate managers, etc.

As a result, our community is better equipped to advance science and serve the public with respect to natural resource needs, resilience to hazards, and protection of essential ecosystem services.