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AIACC Global Kick-off Meeting Regional Breakout Summary: Latin America and the Caribbean 1. CROSS PROJECT COLABORATIONS It is expected that the projects from the Caribbean, Central America and Mexico develop a strong collaboration in climate scenarios and other climate related activities. Collaborations between social scientists form Mexico and Argentina with the Caribbean were also discussed. There is going to be necessary to develop a longer discussion with the climate scenarios advisory team because there are still many aspects that are not clear with respects to the models, data availability, etc. Therefore, a specific request with be to develop an agenda to be discussed in detail during the training workshop in UK. Further and more specific collaborations regarding climate scenarios, data and sectoral impacts will be discussed by members of projects participating at the training sessions (UK and Trieste). 2. ROLE OF REGIONAL MENTORS Regional mentors are expected to play a very active role with the projects providing quick help and advise as well as to establish contacts for some potential inconveniences that normally occur during any project execution. The LAC projects group suggest the development of an interactive WEB page for the LAC that allow the researchers involved to interact efficiently. The group recognized that it might take few months to develop the WEB, therefore the interactions with the mentors will be very necessary during this first months. It is expected that the mentors could also contribute with the formulation of new proposal and with the contacts of potential future sponsors. 3. MEASURING SUCCESS The LAC projects group considers that besides de classical methods established for evaluation of success, like the publications, their quality, peer review processes, interactions with policy makes, it is necessary that success can be part of a continuous process that allows to keep a quality control of the projects. In this respect, the social scientists from the group considered that the translation of results from natural sciences to social sciences, in a well-programmed process, can be a very innovative way for measuring success by individual projects. 4. PRODUCTS WE WANT TO PRODUCE FROM AIACC The group considered that all the suggested products are important; we should stimulate our team to have such productivity that all suggestions can be covered with high quality. 5. OBJECTIVES FOR THE REGIONAL WORKSHOP The workshop is planned by the first quarter of 2003 in Costa Rica. This timing would allow for most of the projects to finish the activities related with the climate scenarios. At the same time, it would be also the initiation of more sectoral applications. Therefore the workshop will contribute with the exchange of the previous experiences and with the discussion preliminary results. During the workshop is also expected to discuss the development of new LAC proposal as well as to call a session with multilateral, bilateral, and development banks for in order to consider possibilities for further financial and technical cooperation. The LAC also considered that the agenda will be more elaborated after some preliminary activities will take place, at this moment some specific training requests for additional or exchange training can be included in the agenda. |
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