University of Massachusetts Amherst
EN-14: Participation in Public Policy

Scott Jackson, an extension Associate Professor in the Department of Environmental Conservation at UMA is one of many researchers and educators at the university whose research and work on conservation, climate and other vital sustainability related topics has informed, impacted and helped shape numerous local, state, federal and global policies on green initiatives over the last decade and beyond. Jackson’s contributions to conservation in Massachusetts include co-founding the River and Stream Continuity Project, which developed standards for culverts and bridges to help minimize their impact on wildlife and river health and created approaches for prioritizing replacement of these road-stream crossings. These methods are now being used across New England and the northeast to protect and restore river continuity. Jackson also led the use of underpass systems to facilitate wildlife movement across roads and in development of methods for evaluating the effectiveness of animal-passage structures, beginning with construction and evaluation of the Henry Street tunnels in Amherst in 1987, the first such structures in North America. This early experiment helped establish the foundation for widespread adoption of wildlife crossing structures in the U.S. and Canada. Jackson also co-led the statewide Critical Linkages connectivity assessment completed in 2013 by the UMass Amherst landscape ecology program. Critical Linkages identifies the dams, road-stream crossings and road segments most important for conservation and transportation agencies to address in order to minimize the impact of these structures on wildlife movement and viability, while maintaining a safe and reliable transportation infrastructure. For all of these efforts Jackson was named 2013 MA Conservationist of the Year by the Nature Conservancy in Massachusetts.

In earlier years, Raymond S. Bradley, director of the Center for Climate Change, was one of many researchers affiliated with UMass Amherst who contributed to reports issued by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The reports earned the panel the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, shared with environmentalist Al Gore. The Nobel Committee granted the prize to the IPCC and Gore “for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change.” The three assessment reports issued explained the physical science basis of global climate change, predicted future impacts of climate change and suggested steps toward mitigation. Research conducted by Bradley and Michael E. Mann detailed substantial human-induced rates of global warming in a 1999 paper that was the major highlight of the third IPCC assessment report. Mann, a former UMass Amherst post-doctoral researcher, is now a faculty member in the department of meteorology at Penn State University. Several former members of the UMass Climate System Research Center in the department of Geosciences also contributed to the reports.