Incorporating research gap identification processes into climate change assessments: a California case study for localized research and knowledge

Literature reviews and gap assessments are established practices in the scientific community for guiding research, but have not been systematically incorporated into major climate assessment processes. California’s Fifth Climate Change Assessment developed and implemented a novel collaborative research gap identification process to guide research funding and report scoping that incorporated public sector, private sector, academic, community, and tribal expertise. This resulted in the submission of over 600 topics that were refined into the final list of 27 research gaps used across a variety of assessment products to improve the scope and applicability of research. Using a modified Delphi process, this model for collaborative identification of research gaps can be replicated by climate assessments at the local, regional, and national levels due to its relatively low cost, relying primarily on staff time and readily available online resources. While California’s climate change assessments include funding for research that targets many of the identified research gaps, the production of a list of research gaps alone is a valuable product that creates more certainty around the relevance of research for government policy objectives both for researchers and government agencies.