How best to communicate climate projections?

 

 

The past year has shown us how much we can be affected by extreme weather events and how much damage such events can cause. Scientists and government produce climate projections of the future to help organisations minimise such damages under a changing future climate. Are climate projections being communicated in a format that you can understand? Are there easier, more intuitive, ways of visualising and communicating the same information?

One of the ICAD Associates, Susanne Lorenz, is trying to explore what works and what doesn’t work for people that need to make decisions to make their organisations and businesses more resilient and future-proof. The inspiration for this research has sprung from personal experience as Susanne used to work in Local Government in the field of climate change adaptation. She has experienced first-hand how difficult it can be to merry up complex scientific information with the realities of supporting organisations in their endeavour to adapt to a changing climate.

This project explores to what extent you understand and interpret visualisations of climate projections: are your needs being met? It is very important to understand your views and feed that back to the scientists. This research aims to improve scientific communication to help you and others better understand and interpret climate projections. 

To this end a survey trialling a number of different climate visualisations to explore your views has been created. If you could spare 20 minutes then please click on the link below and take a look.

https://www.survey.leeds.ac.uk/climatevis

If you have any questions about the survey or the research project please contact Susanne Lorenz