Usable Science 9: El Niño Early Warning for Sustainable Development in Pacific Rim Countries and Islands

* During the preparation of this report, including the feedback from participants from various countries, cultural and disciplinary backgrounds, it became clear that " words matter. " They matter because we communicate by way of the written or spoken word. Some of the key words, including notions and concepts, used during the workshop were either not easily translated into other languages or cultures, or had different meanings and nuances, depending on the context in which they were used. The notion of " hotspots, " serves as one example. The Latin American participants noted that it does not translate well into Spanish. This raised a concern about other notions that might also not be well expressed in other languages. The word " creeping " as part of the phrase " creeping environmental change " was difficult to express in Russian. Some participants took issue with phrases and words such as the following: " weak " El Niño (which could mean either weak physical aspects or weak societal impacts); " reliable forecast " ; and even " adaptation. " This suggested that many words and concepts we use are geography-bound or academic-discipline-bound. Please keep this in mind when reading this report. Each word, even within a given language, can have several meanings in a dictionary. It is important to note the context in which the phrase or the concept is embedded and to realize that such cultural, technical, and geographic meanings can vary in interpretation from their intended use in this report. This is an ever-present problem for which there is no easy solution.