• MUSIC Assistant-Director Beaudry Kock leading GWBSIM modeling workshop in Idaho


• USGS Director meets with MIT President
• Prof. Lawrence Susskind receives IAIA Global Environmental Award
• Herman Karl receives USGS 30 year service award
• MUSIC Assistant-Director Beaudry Kock On the Road: discussing research and the MUSIC program


• Environment Article A DIALOGUE, NOT A DIATRIBE. Effective Integration of Science and Policy through Joint Fact Finding

Global Climate Change Collaborative (G3C)
MUSIC has initiated the Global Climate Change Collaborative (G3C). G3C is a network of institutions around the world that conduct action research projects to help communities, planners, and policy makers develop adaptive management and adaptive governance processes to prepare for the impacts of climate change. For more information, see the G3C page.

What is MUSIC?

There are currently nine MUSIC interns enrolled in the two-year Master of City Planning (MCP) program and three in the PHD Program in Environmental Policy and Planning at MIT.  These students are engaged in a wide range of projects supporting a number of federal agencies including the U.S. Geological Survey, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.  The MCP students, in particular, are training to be Science Impact Coordinators – intermediaries who can facilitate effective interaction between government science agencies and a wide range of stakeholder groups and elected public officials.

This year, interns and doctoral researchers, under the direction of MIT faculty and agency field advisors, are working on:

• Strategies for implementing the USGS Strategic Science Plan for ecosystem management in the Lower Mississippi Valley;
• Techniques for managing in-stream flow to restore the overbank ecosystem through broad-gauged collaboration with stakeholders in the Connecticut River Valley;
• Designing and testing a joint fact finding approach to permitting offshore wind farms (particularly far off-shore in deep water);
• Designing a conservation credit  or trading system as a private-sector led approach to ecosystem conservation;
• Client-based modeling of social and biophysical systems related to water resource management.

These student-faculty teams will not only produce “deliverables” to meet agency deadlines, but also participate in a longer-term action-research effort to document the advantages and disadvantages of collaborative approaches to environmental management. The MUSIC Program is simultaneously a professional training program and a theory building effort.