“Closing the loop”: interpreting user needs and facilitating co-evolution through participatory appraisal

Project 1c

Project staff: Andy Dougill, Leonard Smith, Evan Fraser and Emma Tompkins

This project examines innovative methods of communicating the complexity of climate predictions to a range of users.

Although we have increasingly sophisticated models to predict how, where and when climate change will be felt, it is unclear how this information may be fed back to, and best used by, diverse stakeholders (including businesses, policy makers, communities and households).

Variations in the interpretation of model outputs (or the refusal to interpret them at all), as well as weak and shaky communication among the providers of different expertise, have typically led to confusion and dispute, not only about the underlying evidence, but also about the appropriate response, be it in government policy, business strategy or household decisions.

This project focuses on communicating and propagating both the value and the uncertainty of model evidence, taking a “co-evolutionary” perspective, where model information, and user demands for that information, develop in tandem.