Geoff Dabelko Contributing to Fifth National Climate Assessment

Geoff Dabelko, professor and associate dean of the Voinovich School of Leadership and Public Service at Ohio University, has been invited to participate as a contributor to a report commissioned by Congress to examine the impact of climate change on the nation and the world.

Dabelko has been selected to serve as an author on a chapter on international issues for the Fifth National Climate Assessment, an initiative that brings together hundreds of experts from government, academia, business, industry and nonprofits to analyze the effects of a changing global climate on national interests.

The Fifth National Climate Assessment was integrated by the U.S. Global Change Research Program, established in 1989 by presidential initiative and mandated by Congress in the Global Change Research Act of 1990, according to the U.S. Global Change Research Program website. 

Chapter authors are selected by chapter leads in consultation with the federal coordinating lead author and federal steering committee. These authors, including Dabelko, are responsible for developing chapter content through drafts and edits after multiple rounds of review. 

“It's a big honor. So I mean, it's humbling to be included, but, and it's also real work,” Dabelko said. “It's an opportunity to learn from some fantastic people. It's an opportunity to contribute to an important report that gets a lot of use within the United States by practitioners at multiple levels of government and the private sector and community.”

Dabelko said the work he completed within the Environmental Change and Security Program in Washington D.C. helped prepare him for this role. The job consisted of bringing researchers, practitioners and policymakers together into a research space in order to facilitate a dialogue on what to take away from the research. 

“Our job was to get those different communities in the room, and sometimes it was for us to assess the research literature and write it up in an accessible fashion which is much of what this report is about doing,” Dabelko said. “The practitioners are just so overwhelmed. They need kind of accessible digestible information and research that allows them to see if it applies.

Additionally, Dabelko said his work as a lead author on the Fifth Assessment of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prepared him for this role. The process of assessing literature, digesting it and characterizing what they find is familiar to Dabelko. 

The report has an anticipated delivery in 2023 and Dabelko just finished his orientation to begin work on the Fifth National Climate Assessment. He said he has hopes that the work will be well received by audiences when completed. 

“You hope you can share insights and contribute to a report that will be important for the U.S. government and U.S. citizens,” Dabelko said. “It is not a policy prescription document, we don't say the government should do this or should do that, that's for the practitioners and the policy makers to decide. This is to say, here's what's going on. Here's what the climate impacts are. Here's how it connects to these different topics.”