PROGRAMS

In 2015, the Manager Climate Corps began searching out existing long-term local professional networks that would create the MCC’s foundation and guide its climate research efforts at UH Hilo (see Manager Needs Assessment). Understanding the needs of diverse local professional networks would guide our subsequent knowledge co-production and networking efforts and the types of products that result.

The MCC foundation was deliberately built on sustained, long-term, and in-person interaction with local managers. By focusing on iterative, growing relationships, rather than a momentary needs assessment, the MCC can maintain support for local professional networks through time by sustained understanding of individual managers’ perceptions, norms, values, needs, information sources, and experiences—collectively their worldviews.

While there is a national focus on conducting “stakeholder-driven” science, managers, decision makers, practitioners, and end users are frequently poorly defined and management scales not clearly outlined. Therefore, we chose to connect with individuals whose positions are largely focused within Hawaiʻi Island and who are directly accountable to explicit areas of land, water, and the surrounding communities that utilize the managed natural resources.

The Manager Climate Corps network is comprised of local managers across a variety of organization levels (e.g., county, state and federal government, NGOs, and private land managers), as well as a diversity of management sectors that may be influenced by changing climate (e.g., county planning, agriculture, and infrastructure).

We continue to locate, engage, and build upon existing professional networks in order to the address the diverse array of emerging climate adaptation issues on Hawaiʻi Island. This program is inclusive of wide-ranging management perspectives in native ecosystems (terrestrial and marine), traditional cultural sites, traditional cultural homelands, marine recreation,  near-shore harvesting, transport and safety, ranching, agriculture, county planning, community-based management, fire hazards, and invasive species.

Dive deeper: Manager Needs Assessment

Read more: Environmental Management publication, Needs Assessment report (PDF)

The Manager Climate Corps (MCC) program organizes interactive forums where the large and diverse collection of MCC members from the above research and management collaborations work with MCC staff to organize unique engagement experiences.

In 2016, this network held a three-night, four-day climate change immersion camp bringing together managers, scientists, traditional Hawaiian cultural practitioners, graduate students, and policy professionals. Attendees collaboratively discussed current and near-future needs for adapting to local climate change impacts around the themes of knowledge co-production, multiple ways of knowing, and place-based adaptive management. The camp took place outdoors amid endemic forest species at the Kiolakaʻa Ranger Station in Kaʻū and showcased our four manager-led graduate research projects as collaborative examples for other participating professional networks. Post event surveys indicated a strong interest in further developing diverse professional networks as a mechanism of building local capacities of resiliency, adaptation, and sustainability in the face of global change.

In the years following the immersion camp, the MCC has also developed a number of diverse interactive conference forums locally, regionally, and nationally. The forums are all focused on building adaptive capacity, knowledge co-production, and growing strong in-person networking opportunities between graduate students, scientists, and managers. Forums have utilized a variety of formats (film, panels, small group discussions, and presentations) and are opportunities to interactively participate in uniting multiple knowledge forms and distinct worldviews through professional networking opportunities. Groups in these events typically discussed the application of knowledge co-production on the ground.

By drawing diverse backgrounds, in-person forums such as these are unique opportunities for researchers, managers, and the next generation of professionals to develop relationships, deepen understanding across worldviews, expand networks, develop actionable products, and, thereby, build upon human capacities of adaptation, resilience, and sustainability through times of significant socio-ecological change.

Dive Deeper: 2016 MCC Climate Change Immersion Camp

Check out our other forums: MCC Events