Maria Carmen Lemos

Biosketch

Lemos was a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC-AR5) and the Fourth US National Climate Assessment (NCA4) and has served in a number of the US National Research Council of the National Academies of Sciences committees including Restructuring Federal Climate Research to Meet the Challenges of Climate Change (2007 and 2009), America Climate Choice Science Panel (2010) and the Board on Environmental Change and Society (2008-2014), the Council Committee to Advise the U.S. Global Change Research Program (2011-13), the Societal Expert Action Network (SEAN) (2021-present) and the Board for Atmospheric Sciences (BASC, 2023-present)

Research Interests

Maria Carmen Lemos' broad research interests focus on scientific actionable knowledge, especially applied to climate adaptation and the role of knowledge in building adaptive capacity. She is particularly interested in understanding: (a) the co-production of scientific actionable knowledge between scientists and users to inform decision-making to solve sustainability problems, (b) the means through which actionable knowledge scales up especially to inform adaptation action, (c) the use of climate information in building adaptive capacity in different sectors (e.g. drought planning, water management, agriculture, and urban planning), and (d) the impact of technocratic decision-making on issues of democracy and equity.