#ClimateResearchNet - a collaboration of climate communicators

#ClimateResearchNet

Climate Science is an active field of research whose findings are constantly feeding our knowledge about the changing climate, future scenarios and possible solutions. The climate-research community plays a key role in informing policy- and decision-makers, business and society. Hence, climate researchers are frequently urged to engage in climate change dialogues, as they are crucial stakeholders.

There is often a long gap before published research results reach the policy universe and an even longer time before they reach the rest of society. This network aims to give climate research communication a push so that its results are shared faster, more efficiently and more broadly.

A group of EU and nationally-funded climate research projects identified the need to collaborate and build a community of climate communicators to increase the impact of our research. Currently, there are over 20 projects represented in our network.

Objectives of the Network

• Increasing the impact of each member’s communication by:
•        Reaching a broader and more diverse audience,
•        Having a pool of valuable content to share regularly - to keep our social networks active.
• Creating a community of practice to build common knowledge on best practices and to make climate-research communication more impactful.
• Establish a strong presence of the climate research community in communication networks and on social media. 

Whilst the network is still in its infancy, there have been some initial achievements, including:

•  A science-to-policy meeting with EU officials in Brussels, which involved research from 5 EU projects,
• Submission of a Great Debate session at EGU2024 – “Unleashing your potential as an Early-Career researcher: bridging the research-policy divide”,
• Network meetings where we have shared our experiences, provided project introductions, and mapped out stakeholder engagement, communications and early career researcher activities across the projects and identified some topics of common interest eg. participation in COPs.

We would love to engage with other projects, hearing about their experiences in managing communication of their project results, types of activities that have been impactful and how communication roles in projects can be better networked to provide a community of practice.

Authors: Hazel Jeffery, Mariana Rocha, Helena Martins, Sara Octenjak, Rosa Rodriguez Gasen