Next Steps for Earth Science Contributions to Community Resilience

Community resilience increases a place-based community’s capacity to respond and adapt to life-changing environmental dynamics like climate change and natural disasters. Timely access to environmental data is an important factor for community resilience. Most Earth science information is created for a particular science community for a specific scientific purpose, without much thought to who else could benefit from it and how they might use it. New approaches are needed to facilitate better data production and integration for community use.

In this session, we present the findings of a paper published by ESIP’s (Earth Science Information Partners) Community Resilience Cluster. As a convening space for over 150 member organizations across different sectors, ESIP’s biannual meetings, conference calls, and topic-driven clusters provided the infrastructure and expertise to support the Community Resilience cluster’s examination of the role of Earth science data for community resilience. This presentation highlights the challenges communities face when applying Earth science data to their efforts:

• Inequity in the scientific process,

• Gaps in data ethics and governance,

• A mismatch of scale and focus, and

• Lack of actionable information for communities.

Recommendations are made as starting points to address the challenges, along with examples of good practices from across the Earth science community. Given ESIP’s data stewardship efforts with large organizations and across domains, the recommendations are applicable at scale. We offer actionable steps for the Earth science community to help them produce data to better support community resilience.