Consortium on Climate Change and Population Health
A Joint Project of SeaTrust Institute and IGI Global
[excerpt from Consortium design document] 
“We have first raised a dust, and then complain we cannot see.”
- Berkeley, The Principles of Human Knowledge (1710)
Ecological sustainability, human health and social science inform the content in this e-research collaborative effort. Interweaving the complex systems of climate change and population health may appear somewhat chaotic from a traditional disciplinary perspective. Yet as concerns escalate on these topics, their inextricable linkages affect all areas of society such that “conversation and exchange of arguments become crucial at the interface of science and society, in particular when dealing with the complex problems related to global environmental change” (Welp et al. 2006).
Stressing the need to go beyond integrating disciplines to address climate 
and environmental issues, a recent past President of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) called for sustainability science that is “interdisciplinary, intersectoral and integrative” on a worldwide scale (Holdren 2007). It is hoped that imbedding sustainability, population health, climate change and public policy in an interdisciplinary context will “raise a dust” through which the Consortium co-creates new knowledge leading towards solutions to climate change adaptations affecting population health by identifying vulnerabilities, sensitivities and indicators of adaptive capacities (Polsky, Neff, and Yarnal 2007) and targets that can be refined through interdisciplinary discourse and mapping in a virtual environment.
This project focuses on contributing to creating new knowledge through interdisciplinary discovery in climate change and population health. Issues at the nexus of these areas are particularly well suited to explorations of blending knowledge and methods through interdisciplinary scholarship and praxis concentrating on:
Framing debates on globally relevant issues
Reflection on significant e-learning, science and policy scholarship
Conceiving and considering ways and means to translate theory into action
This project focuses on interdisciplinary e-collaborative principles to encourage the development of synergies in new arenas. These new relationships will provide the basis for true knowledge co-creation, a process that goes beyond combining disciplinary information. The desired process is reflected in the “innovate” discourse approach adapted from the Collaborative Integration Paradigm used to evaluate contributions to a recent IGI Global publication (Wilson and Salmons 2008).
Desired outcomes of this process are to:
Create policy-relevant interdisciplinary knowledge streams and question
Identify and prioritize research needs to address those question
Communicate results to a wide audience in e-research with an eye to contributing to a communications strategy for policy effectiveness
Inform policy decisions rather than make policy recommendations
References
Holdren, John. 2007. Session Presentation to Grand Challenges to Sustainable Science: SustainableSystems. 2007 AAAS Annual Meeting: Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being, February 17.
Polsky, C., R. Neff, and B. Yarnal. 2007. Building comparable global change vulnerability assessments: The vulnerability scoping diagram. Global Environmental Change 17:472-785.
Welp, M., A. de la Vega-Leinert, S. Stoll-Kleemann, and C. Jaeger. 2006. Science-based stakeholder dialogues: Theories and tools. Global Environmental Change 16:170-181.
Wilson, L., and J. Salmons. 2008. Online collaborative integration and recommendations for future research. In Handbook of research in electronic collaboration and organizational synergy, edited by J. Salmons and L. Wilson. Hershey, PA: IGI Global.