Readings and Tasks:
Mark Serreze. 2019. “What is Cryosphere?” https://www.livescience.com/what-is-the-cryosphere.html
NASA. 2019 “Drought-Stressed Forest Fueled Amazon Fires” https://climate.nasa.gov/news/2929/drought-stressed-forest-fueled-amazon-fires/
Policy Brief Rubric and Grading Structure: 10 Points
A Policy Brief is a short document summarizing a government action/policy, the methods of sharing that with a general audience…not a specialist audience… and some recommendations for possible future actions. REMEMBER it’s a “brief” (short summary) of an existing policy; therefore, a Policy Brief. NO more than two pages.
Students will select a government policy on any one of the topics of this course and write a Policy Brief on it. Therefore, please refrain from employing jargon-based language. Acronyms are to be spelt out. Make the Policy Brief simple and easily understandable.
Length: 300-600 words, no more than two pages
Sections to include. Please provide the headings in your Policy Brief similar to the ones below.
A) Title- keep it snappy, short and informative.
B) Executive Summary- two to three sentences summing up the entire Policy Brief. Use recognizable buzzwords and emphasize the relevance of the research to policy to draw the reader’s attention to read on.
C) Main Body: Background, Methods & Approaches and Results: Explain the background to the problem, the methodology/approaches used to reach the results that dictated the establishing of that policy, such as a synthesis of existing research/literature or new research data, or events that prompted the government to establish that policy. Finally present the results.
E) Conclusions- reinforce the key message one can take away from the Policy Brief. Remember the executive summary is where typical conclusion content is, do not simply repeat it. However, also, do not conclude with something entirely different from the executive summary.
F) Policy Recommendations- try and make at least one feasible policy recommendation. If you are making more than one recommendation, differentiate them clearly e.g. in bullet points and keep it to maximum three.
G) References and Suggested Sources- use references sparingly and suggest a few additional sources at the end to give either background or more detail to the policy issue. Use APA stylesheet
