The Role of Science

The Role of Science

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Research Domain 2 (RD2), “Producing the ‘Best’ Evidence for Climate Change Decision-Making?”, led by James Porter, traces the way in which climate knowledge develops, and in turn, changes as it travels across different production sites before eventually being applied. How and why, for example, does climate adaptation information come to take a particular form in decision-making? Is it related to climate scientists, and other experts, delivering what they think users need? Or is it due to practical, at once socio-technical and institutional-political, considerations about the kind of modelling to produce?

Using the UK’s recent Climate Change Risk Assessment (CCRA) and the UK’s Climate Change Projections (UKCP09) as a starting point, RD2 focuses on the key role played by climate scientists, modellers, statisticians and specialist consultancies in the construction, evaluation and interpretation of climate information. Combining in-depth interviews with ethnographic-based observations, this project seeks to understand what effect, if any, these actors have on the kind of climate knowledge that’s produced, and by extension, its later use.

Contact James Porter

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