A growing body of research indicates that effective science-policy interactions demand novel approaches, especially in policy domains with long time horizons like climate change. Serious games offer ...promising opportunities in this regard, but empirical research on game effects and games’ effectiveness in supporting science-policy engagement remains limited. We investigated the effects of a role-playing simulation game on risk perceptions associated with climate tipping points among a knowledgeable and engaged audience of non-governmental observers of the international climate negotiations and scientists. We analysed its effects on concern, perceived seriousness, perceived likelihood and psychological distance of tipping points, using pre- and post-game surveys, debriefing questions and game observations. Our findings suggest that the game reduced the psychological distance of tipping points, rendering them more ‘real’, proximate and tangible for participants. More generally, our findings indicate that role-playing simulation games, depending on their design and future orientation, can provide effective science-policy engagement tools that allow players to engage in future thinking and corresponding meaning making.
Increasing numbers of scholars and practitioners appeal to procedural theories of ‘co-production’ as they work to transform climate science into climate services. Most work in this direction ...theorises co-production as an ‘iterative and interactive’ process between climate service providers and users, with success measured mainly in terms of the usefulness and usability of the information product for the user. But notwithstanding these first important steps, this perspective paper argues that the current study of climate service co-production is too narrowly framed, and fails to properly engage with the broad and rich literature that conceives of co-production processes in a diversity of ways. The authors suggest a fresh look on co-production as a process best examined simultaneously from several complimentary perspectives, with reference to recent work reconceptualising co-production as an eight-sided ‘prism’. Using an illustrative example of climate services developed to predict and visualise future flooding in the municipality of Voss, in Norway, the paper demonstrates how this prism concept of co-production can enable a more comprehensive view on co-production as a multi-faceted phenomenon, improve mutual understanding among actors and, ultimately, help design climate services that are better tailored for climate change responses in particular contexts. Keywords: Climate services, Co-production, Evaluation, Voss
Climate change may pose considerable challenges to coastal cities, particularly in low-lying urban deltas. Impacts are, however, associated with substantial uncertainties. This paper studies an ...uncertainty-robust adaptation strategy: strengthening the resilience of the impacted system. This approach is operationalised for the city of Rotterdam, using literature study, interviews, and a workshop. Potential impacts have been explored using national climate statistics and scenarios and a set of ‘wildcards’ (imaginable surprises). Sea level rise, particularly in combination with storm surge, and enduring heat and drought are the most relevant potential stresses in the area. These can lead to damage, loss of image, and societal disruption. Unclear responsibilities enhance disruption. ‘Resilience principles’ made the concept of resilience sufficiently operational for local actors to explore policy options. Useful principles for urban resilience include: homeostasis, omnivory, high flux, flatness, buffering, redundancy, foresight and preparedness/planning, compartmentalisation, and flexible planning/design. A resilience approach makes the system less prone to disturbances, enables quick and flexible responses, and is better capable of dealing with surprises than traditional predictive approaches. Local actors frame resilience as a flexible approach to adaptation that would be more suitable and tailored to local situations than rigid top–down regulations. In addition to a change in policy, it would require a more pro-active mentality among the population.
Cities worldwide are building ‘resilience’ in the face of water-related challenges. International networks have emerged through which urban communities draw on each other’s experiences and expertise ...in order to become resilient cities. Learning is a key principle in resilience-building, but thus far little empirical research is available on city-to-city learning and learning for urban resilience. This paper presents an analysis of how policy relevant knowledge on the notion of ‘Water Squares’ is exchanged between Rotterdam and Mexico City. We mobilize a framework composed of four distinct phases: exploration and marketing (phase 1), building pipelines (phase 2), translation and adoption (phase 3), and internalization and reflection (phase 4). Critical in first phase was introspective analysis of one’s own systems, strengths and weaknesses, rather than an outward-looking search for knowledge or mentees. During the second phase, the cities reframed their own narratives to match those of their counterparts as a way to create a mutual understanding of each other’s struggles and histories. This facilitated policy and knowledge exchange as equal partners on a basis of trust. In the third phase, strong local leaders were recruited into the process, which was key to anchor knowledge in the community and to reduce the risks of losing institutional memory in centralized, hierarchical institutions. For the fourth phase it should be stressed that by internalizing such lessons, cities might strengthen not only their own resilience, but also enhance future exchanges with other cities.
Cities worldwide face climate change and other complex challenges and strive to become more resilient to the shocks and stresses that these bring. The notion of urban (climate) resilience has become ...highly popular in both research and practice. However, the concept is inherently malleable; it can be framed in different ways, emphasising different problems, causes, moral judgements, and solutions. This review explores contrasting ways of framing urban climate resilience and their potential consequences. It identifies four typical framings: Urban Shock-Proofing (short-term & system focus), Resilience Planning (long-term & system focus), Community Disaster Resilience (short-term & community focus), and Resilient Community Development (long-term & community focus). These framings lead to different approaches to urban resilience and climate adaptation in research, science-policy-society interactions, governance, and practical resilience-building. They also offer different synergies with wider sustainability efforts, including the SDGs. Resilience Planning is widely represented in urban climate adaptation research. However, Resilient Community Development, dealing with community self-determination, equity, and deeper long-term socio-political determinants of vulnerability, is currently underdeveloped. Expansion of current scientific and institutional toolboxes is needed to support and build community-based adaptive and transformative capacities. Explicit reflection on framing is important to facilitate collaboration among actors and across disciplinary and departmental siloes.
Exposure to fine ambient particulate matter (PM) has consistently been associated with increased morbidity and mortality. The relationship between exposure to ultrafine particles (UFP) and health ...effects is less firmly established. If UFP cause health effects independently from coarser fractions, this could affect health impact assessment of air pollution, which would possibly lead to alternative policy options to be considered to reduce the disease burden of PM. Therefore, we organized an expert elicitation workshop to assess the evidence for a causal relationship between exposure to UFP and health endpoints.
An expert elicitation on the health effects of ambient ultrafine particle exposure was carried out, focusing on: 1) the likelihood of causal relationships with key health endpoints, and 2) the likelihood of potential causal pathways for cardiac events. Based on a systematic peer-nomination procedure, fourteen European experts (epidemiologists, toxicologists and clinicians) were selected, of whom twelve attended. They were provided with a briefing book containing key literature. After a group discussion, individual expert judgments in the form of ratings of the likelihood of causal relationships and pathways were obtained using a confidence scheme adapted from the one used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The likelihood of an independent causal relationship between increased short-term UFP exposure and increased all-cause mortality, hospital admissions for cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, aggravation of asthma symptoms and lung function decrements was rated medium to high by most experts. The likelihood for long-term UFP exposure to be causally related to all cause mortality, cardiovascular and respiratory morbidity and lung cancer was rated slightly lower, mostly medium. The experts rated the likelihood of each of the six identified possible causal pathways separately. Out of these six, the highest likelihood was rated for the pathway involving respiratory inflammation and subsequent thrombotic effects.
The overall medium to high likelihood rating of causality of health effects of UFP exposure and the high likelihood rating of at least one of the proposed causal mechanisms explaining associations between UFP and cardiac events, stresses the importance of considering UFP in future health impact assessments of (transport-related) air pollution, and the need for further research on UFP exposure and health effects.
Cities face increasing risks due to climate change, and many cities are actively working towards increasing their climate resilience. Climate change-induced risks and interventions to reduce these ...risks do not only impact urban risk management systems and infrastructures, but also people’s daily lives. In order to build public support for climate adaptation and resilience-building and stimulate collaboration between authorities and citizens, it is necessary that adaptation and resilience-building are locally meaningful. Thus, interventions should be rooted in citizens’ concerns and aspirations for their city. Urban policymakers and researchers have started the search for better citizen participation in adaptation. However, tools to connect the relatively strategic and long-term notions of adaptation to a gradually changing climate held by planners and scientists with how citizens experience today’s climate and weather remain elusive. This paper investigates the use of ‘narratives of change’ as an approach to elicit perceptions of past, present and future weather, water, and climate, and how these relate to citizens’ desired futures. We tested this by eliciting and comparing narratives of change from authorities and from citizens in the Dutch city of Dordrecht. Our analysis of the process showed that historical events, embedded in local memory and identity, have a surprisingly strong impact on how climate change is perceived and acted upon today. This contributes to an awareness and sense of urgency of some climate risks (e.g. flood risks). However, it also shifts attention away from other risks (e.g. intensified heat stress). The analysis highlighted commonalities, like shared concerns about climate change and desires to collaborate, but also differences in how climate change, impacts, and action are conceptualized. There are possibilities for collaboration and mutual learning, as well as areas of potential disagreement and conflict. We conclude that narratives are a useful tool to better connect the governance of climate adaptation with peoples’ daily experience of climate risks and climate resilience, thereby potentially increasing public support for and participation in resilience-building.
How are communities worldwide experiencing changes to their seasons? Through 35 real-world accounts of seasonal change by researchers and practitioners, this anthology gives pause to critically ...rethink what seasons mean. The chapters invite us to see seasons not as stable facts of nature, but as cultural ways of living in the world, evolving with populations and places. Revisiting seasons is one way in which communities adapt in turbulent times.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a key source on climate change information. How the IPCC presents and frames this climate information influences how policymakers and various ...stakeholders worldwide perceive climate change and make decisions accordingly. Visuals are powerful components in this communication. Here, we assess how the visuals (
N
= 702) in the IPCC Working Group II Assessment Reports frame climate impacts and adaptation. We find that visuals are largely framed as distant in time and space and predominantly portray the threats of climate change rather than possible goals to be achieved. Furthermore, conceptually, they are largely narrow, science-oriented instead of showing a broader multi-impact or multi-strategy evaluation of the impacts on society and necessary adaptations. They primarily depicted what the impacts and adaptations were, with minimal attention to who was impacted or needed to take adaption actions or adopt responsibility. Very few of the visuals in WG II (
N
= 48, 6.5%) focus on adaptation and those that did often do not show a clear theme, spatial or temporal scale. Our findings suggest that IPCC visuals (still) focus primarily on showing that climate change is real and a problem, with little solution-oriented communication. We recommend that the IPCC pays explicit attention to its visual framing and that approaches are developed to better visualise adaptation.
In order to enable anticipation and proactive adaptation, local decision makers increasingly seek detailed foresight about regional and local impacts of climate change. To this end, the Netherlands ...Models and Data-Centre implemented a pilot chain of sequentially linked models to project local climate impacts on hydrology, agriculture and nature under different national climate scenarios for a small region in the east of the Netherlands named Baakse Beek. The chain of models sequentially linked in that pilot includes a (future) weather generator and models of respectively subsurface hydrogeology, ground water stocks and flows, soil chemistry, vegetation development, crop yield and nature quality. These models typically have mismatching time step sizes and grid cell sizes. The linking of these models unavoidably involves the making of model assumptions that can hardly be validated, such as those needed to bridge the mismatches in spatial and temporal scales. Here we present and apply a method for the systematic critical appraisal of model assumptions that seeks to identify and characterize the weakest assumptions in a model chain. The critical appraisal of assumptions presented in this paper has been carried out ex-post. For the case of the climate impact model chain for Baakse Beek, the three most problematic assumptions were found to be: land use and land management kept constant over time; model linking of (daily) ground water model output to the (yearly) vegetation model around the root zone; and aggregation of daily output of the soil hydrology model into yearly input of a so called 'mineralization reduction factor' (calculated from annual average soil pH and daily soil hydrology) in the soil chemistry model. Overall, the method for critical appraisal of model assumptions presented and tested in this paper yields a rich qualitative insight in model uncertainty and model quality. It promotes reflectivity and learning in the modelling community, and leads to well informed recommendations for model improvement.
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