Like many of you, I have dedicated myself to AGU because I want to ask a bigger question than, “How do we protect what we have?” I believe we should be asking, “If we were building the scientific enterprise today, what would we create?”
The scientific community is in the midst of severe challenges. We can react to each of them, or we can seize the opportunity in front of us—to reenvision the infrastructure that supports modern science and, most important, how we turn that science into solutions.
Over the past year, AGU and our global community have started answering that question one step at a time. Last summer we created the Data Resilience Project to address the governance and technical architecture that a more resilient global data network needs. Then we began to look at the future of scientific assessments.
Assessment is how we turn research findings into information people can act on. Rather than focusing on a single study, an assessment evaluates, stress-tests, and combines many streams of evidence to show what we know, how well we know it, and why it matters.
Over the past year, we’ve had to reckon with the U.S. federal government pulling support from some of these critical assessments. When the authors were dismissed from the National Climate Assessment, AGU stepped forward. With our partners at the American Meteorological Society, we launched the U.S. Climate Collection. Our goal was not to replace the assessment, but to reimagine what support for this report looks like. When the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration withdrew support from the Arctic Report Card, AGU stepped up to support the editors at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), University of Colorado Boulder, and the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and we are committed to publishing their assessment in December.
We aren’t stopping there. Today I’m proud to announce that we are building something that truly reenvisions how the global scientific community approaches these critical scientific instruments with the launch of AGU’s Initiative for Science Assessments.
The initiative is an independent ecosystem led by scientists and supported by AGU’s publishing and convening infrastructure. We are bringing together experts across disciplines, alongside the people who put science to work. We are building common standards that improve the quality and transparency of every assessment.
The Initiative for Science Assessments does not replace government-led assessments, which remain essential, but complements them. Assessments truly led by the scientific community can move into emerging topics, work at different scales, and respond with a flexibility that formal processes cannot always match. They can also become foundational inputs to larger national and international efforts.
Data, assessment, evidence, and now an initiative to connect them. These are not separate projects—together they are a new way of organizing how science serves society.
We are only getting started, and we need you. The initiative is now seeking its inaugural cohort of guest associate editors, who will guide the first round of assessments in Earth’s Future. If you are a scientist who wants to help shape what comes next, I hope you will reach out to our team. And please join us in San Francisco this December at our Annual Meeting, where we will share exciting updates.
Science has always been about asking what’s possible. Let’s apply that same question toward the practice of science itself.
—Brandon Jones, President, AGU