Understanding Science and Communicating Uncertainty in Climate Solutions, with Gil Pontius

????Two years ago, geography professor Gil Pontius was teaching his class on Geographic Information Sciences (#GIS) and land change modeling at Clark University when he saw a chance to give his students some real-world experience.

??“Verra has various phases where they are open to anyone who wants to give them feedback,” he says. “My number one rule for my classes is that the students have to make a difference on someone outside of that classroom.”

???♂? #Verra, the standard-setting body that oversees the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS), relies heavily on a blend of public consultation and expert review to develop standardized methods for tasks such as estimating #deforestation risk.

?? Pontius's research has featured prominently in those estimates: In the early 1990s, he created a land-change model called GeoMod to extrapolate deforestation and the associated greenhouse gas emissions.

??Environmental NGOs have been harnessing #GeoMod and other elements of his research to identify vulnerable forests ever since.

??Over the past 15 years, GeoMod has become a popular tool for estimating deforestation risks in #REDD+ projects, which leverage carbon finance to protect endangered forests.

??Pontius has continued to develop concepts that are essential to the proper application and interpretation of land change simulation models, but it wasn’t until that class assignment two years ago that he began direct collaboration with Verra.

????“I said, ‘Look, Verra is soliciting open feedback on their modeling procedures, so as a course project, why don't you make a report for them and even make a video of it and submit the report in the video?’” he recalls.

???In this episode of Bionic Planet, he tells us how Verra responded to his student inquiries and takes us on a journey into the philosophy of science, the differences between science as a tool for discovery and #pseudoscience as a tool for persuasion, and the challenges of communicating #uncertainty.

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