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Federal investments by U.S. agencies to enhance climate resilience at regional scales grew over the past decade (2010s). To maximize efficiency and effectiveness in serving multiple sectors and scales, it has become critical to leverage existing agency-specific research, infrastructure, and capacity while avoiding redundancy. We discuss lessons learned from a multi-institutional “regional climate response collaborative” that comprises three different federally supported climate service entities in the Rocky Mountain west and northern plains region. These lessons include leveraging different strengths of each partner, creating deliberate mechanisms to increase cross-entity communication and joint ownership of projects, and placing a common priority on stakeholder-relevant research and outcomes. We share the conditions that fostered successful collaboration, which can be transferred elsewhere, and suggest mechanisms for overcoming potential barriers. Synergies are essential for producing actionable research that informs climate-related decisions for stakeholders and ultimately enhances climate resilience at regional scales. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate perception, broadly construed, can include interpretations of experienced climate, beliefs about how climate works or changes, attitudes about climate issues such as the human role in climate change, and even climate preferences. The recent literature has stressed three main themes: attitudes and beliefs about anthropogenic climate change, climate literacy, and experienced knowledge of climate change. This study focuses on how people come to “know” climate, not just climate change, in a more fundamental way. To discern the structure of these knowledges we conducted semi-structured interviews of residents of a basin in the U.S. Rocky Mountains whose livelihoods and avocations bring them in routine contact with weather, climate, and landscape. Analysis of their climate knowledge in three categories, features, processes, and benchmarks, and placed in perspective of previous research on climate knowledges, yielded three findings. 1) People often focus on climate-related proxies that might be disregarded as tangential within narrow definitions of climate. 2) People use rubrics to structure climate knowledge, they understand climate as relational and connected. 3) Climate knowledge does not isolate individual climate elements, but accentuates the complex way that many processes together constitute climate. These findings reveal that, for our interviewees, climate is a social-ecological-atmospheric construct. This has both theoretical and methodological implications for future research on climate perception and illuminates the challenge of linking perception to effective mitigation and adaptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]