Now, Jewell brings a lifetime of experience in business, nonprofits, government and the outdoors to the 天美影视传媒, where one of her tasks is to help shape the future of , a new university-wide institute that seeks to connect scholars with community partners to solve our most difficult environmental problems.

, U.S. Secretary of the Interior under President Barack Obama and former CEO of REI, has returned to her alma mater to work as a distinguished fellow with the College of the Environment and to serve in a volunteer capacity as chair of the advisory council for EarthLab.

As a fellow with the College of the Environment, she will guest lecture with various units across campus, mentor students and collaborate with faculty and staff. In her capacity as chair of EarthLab’s advisory council, she will develop a team of advisors composed entirely of people outside the university with varied backgrounds and expertise that will provide strategic guidance, support and direction for EarthLab.

“By coming to the university, I’m trying to help students understand how you can create a future that’s both economically successful and environmentally sustainable 鈥� one that you are proud to leave to future generations,” said Jewell, who received her bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering at the UW and served on the Board of Regents for 12 years. “EarthLab is addressing that by working outside the university to identify and raise support for solving big challenges, especially those in the environment, then bringing together multidisciplinary teams from across the university to help.”

In addition to the outside advisory council, whose members Jewell will name by the end of 2018, EarthLab is supported by a leadership board of deans and a steering committee made up of faculty and academic leaders across all three campuses and disciplines. This broad leadership translates to the variety of projects EarthLab will tackle 鈥� projects that will require multidisciplinary teams.

“Think of EarthLab as a bridge that connects our diverse scholarship with people who can use it to make better decisions about the significant environmental challenges we’re facing,” said , EarthLab’s executive director. “We couldn’t ask for a better person than Sally Jewell to help us launch this advisory council. She’s full of passion for the university to be more engaged in these big challenges, and she knows from her experiences how to navigate across sectors.”

While the EarthLab concept has been percolating at the UW for nearly a decade, in the past year the idea has coalesced into a tangible organization led by Packard, who previously worked at The Nature Conservancy and Starbucks. At its core, EarthLab will connect researchers at the UW with decision-makers to develop actionable solutions to the most pressing environmental challenges.

What makes this different from previous collaborations is an intentional push to establish long-term, working relationships between scholars and outside organizations to address messy, complex issues that won’t be solved with the publication of one paper, or the funding of one project.

That might involve partnering with a city to find environmentally sustainable ways to build affordable housing, or working with shellfish growers to lessen the impact of ocean acidification on their businesses, or advising a municipal agency on how to deal with contaminated stormwater runoff.

“This is really about deep involvement, thinking locally and globally, and bringing people who have never been at the table before into a partnership where the UW is just one of the entities. For me as an academic, it’s a really different way of thinking about our role,” said College of the Environment Dean and Mary Laird Wood Professor , who was the college’s founding dean in 2010 and has envisioned a program such as EarthLab from the start.

Similar programs exist at a handful of universities across the U.S., including Arizona State University, Columbia University, Stanford University, the University of Minnesota and the University of Vermont. These various institutes also work at the boundary of university scholarship and society, putting science into action and engaging in ongoing research with decision-makers from all sectors.

“Many people outside the university describe UW as a building with no doors. There are a lot of windows and they can see something is going on, but they don’t know how to get in,” Packard said. “The university’s mission to serve society will be met if we’re more accessible and engaged, listening more and adjusting to serve society’s needs without compromising the integrity of our independent scholarship.”

The UW’s and are two existing organizations that are members of EarthLab. Both have track records of working with local communities and municipalities to address relevant issues related to climate change. For example, researchers with the Climate Impacts Group and Washington Sea Grant recently that offered the clearest picture yet of sea level rise at more than 150 coastal sites in Washington. These localized projections will help coastal communities better plan infrastructure projects and evacuation routes, among other things.

Because these kinds of projects can cross many academic fields, EarthLab will be a home for multidisciplinary, applied research, and will provide administrative support and services for “nontraditional” grants that could fund an applied research project that addresses an environmental problem in society.

An EarthLab grants program will begin in early 2019, geared toward faculty who are working on “first mile” or “last mile” problems 鈥� either beginning a project that involves engaging community partners, or finding ways to make completed research relevant to communities. One goal is to involve students who want to work on interdisciplinary research teams.

“Students almost universally want this,” said Jewell, referencing her conversations with students at the UW and at Harvard during a recent fellowship. “They want to have an experience here, and in their work with professors, that has applicability when they leave. We have the chance to do this here through EarthLab. I think there will be many opportunities for students to work on real-life issues.”

Another long-term goal of EarthLab is to reward faculty who are working on multidisciplinary, applied research that addresses current societal problems. Most units across campus award tenure and career advancement in a way that encourages researchers to focus narrowly and maximize their number of publications, Packard said.

EarthLab’s leaders realize the scale of such a change.

“What we’re talking about is nothing short of how the UW shows up in the 21^st century,” Packard said. “If we’re going to invest in this and support our faculty and students to engage in this way, then we will fundamentally change the way the university shows up.”

EarthLab received foundational support from the Bullitt Foundation, the Stolte Family Foundation and several individuals.

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For more information, contact Packard at bwpack@uw.edu or 206-616-0357.

Global carbon dioxide emissions are triggering troubling changes to ocean chemistry along the West Coast that require immediate, decisive actions to combat through a coordinated regional approach, a panel of scientific experts has unanimously concluded.

A failure to adequately respond to this fundamental change in seawater chemistry, known as ocean acidification, is anticipated to have devastating ecological consequences for the West Coast in the decades to come, the 20-member , which included scientists from the 天美影视传媒 and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Seattle office, warned in a unveiled April 4.

鈥淭he findings of the West Coast OAH Science Panel build on those of the , extending those findings to the entire West Coast, and incorporating consideration of the growing stressor, hypoxia. The strength of the OAH Panel鈥檚 findings lies in the coordinated, regional approach to the problem and opportunities for mitigation and adaptation that are scaled to the West Coast,鈥� said , who participated in both panels and co-directs the . Klinger is also director and professor of the UW’s .

鈥淒ue to the combined impacts of ocean acidification and seasonal upwelling, the West Coast is exposed to unusually high volumes of seawater at elevated acidity levels,鈥� said Richard Feely of NOAA鈥檚 Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle.

Already, marine shelled organisms in Washington are having difficulty forming their protective outer shells, and the local shellfish industry is seeing high mortality rates in early life stages of some commercially important shellfish species when shell formation is critical.

鈥淭he acidity of West Coast waters is anticipated to continue to accelerate in lockstep with rising atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions,鈥� Feely added.

The panel鈥檚 final report, titled 鈥�,鈥� summarizes the state of the science around the anticipated impacts of these multiple stressors on our marine resources. It outlines a series of potential management actions that the governments of Washington, Oregon, California and British Columbia can immediately begin implementing to offset and mitigate the economic and ecological impacts of ocean acidification.

The panel is urging ocean management and natural resource agencies to develop highly coordinated, comprehensive multiagency solutions, including:

• Reducing carbon emissions is critical to addressing the root cause
• Exploring approaches that involve the use of seagrass to remove carbon dioxide from seawater
• Supporting wholesale revisions to water-quality criteria that are used as benchmarks for improving water quality, as existing water-quality criteria were not written to protect marine organisms from the damaging effects of ocean acidification
• Identifying strategies for reducing the amounts of land-based pollution entering coastal waters, especially in bays, estuaries and sounds, as this pollution can exacerbate the intensity of acidification in some locations
• Enhancing a West Coast-wide monitoring network that provides information toward development of coastal ecosystem management plans
• Supporting approaches that enhance the adaptive capacity of marine organisms to cope with ocean acidification

The report emphasized that global carbon emissions are the dominant cause of ocean acidification and that the West Coast states should advance regional carbon management strategies. The panel deliberately focused its recommendations around actions West Coast ocean management and natural resource agencies can take in each jurisdiction to combat the challenge at the regional level.

For example, the (MRAC) 鈥� formed after the Blue Ribbon Panel on Ocean Acidification 鈥� is advancing the Blue Ribbon Panel鈥檚 ocean acidification strategies, helping Washington adapt and respond to ocean acidification. Its members plan to go to the state legislature in 2017 for more funding for research, monitoring, modeling and outreach.

The Washington Ocean Acidification Center is providing funds from the state legislature to shellfish growers to continue monitoring at five key sites in Puget Sound and Willapa Bay. The water-quality monitoring alerts growers to periods where conditions are not conducive for hatchery production so that they can maximize production and avoid losses due to ocean acidification.

The center is also partnering with NOAA Fisheries to perform experimental studies on Dungeness crab, and is collaborating with Washington Sea Grant to fund innovative, new experimental studies on the state’s salmon and sablefish.

鈥淭he Washington OA Center plays a role in coordinating science and monitoring, in collaboration with many partners, and then consistently communicating results to the MRAC, providing a critical link to policymakers and the legislature in Washington state. We find this structure to be an effective means of connecting science with policy and recommend that this type of coordination could be implemented along the West Coast,鈥� said , a UW oceanographer who co-directs the Washington Ocean Acidification Center and participated in both panels.

West Coast policymakers will use the panel鈥檚 recommendations to continue to advance management actions aimed at combating ocean acidification and hypoxia. This work will be coordinated through the Pacific Coast Collaborative, a coalition of the offices of the governors of Washington, Oregon, California, and the premier of British Columbia, which have been working together on ocean acidification since 2013.

The West Coast OAH Science Panel, which convened for a three-year period that ended in February, also has recommended the formation of a task force to continue to advance the scientific foundation for comprehensive, managerially relevant solutions to West Coast ocean acidification.

This was adapted from a release by the California Ocean Science Trust. .