Exploring How Stakeholders Use, Understand, and Feel about Climate Science Products

Future climate conditions may dramatically impact many of the natural resources, cultural resources, and ecosystem services on which society depends. To ensure the long-term sustainability of these resources, decision-makers across many domains (e.g. federal, state, NGO, Tribal) commonly consider climate forecasts in their strategic planning efforts. In the South Central United States, future climate conditions are routinely considered in plans for water sustainability, agricultural production, the design of new infrastructure, urban heat impacts, and decisions to federally list a species as threatened or endangered. Scientists have developed sophisticated projections of future climate conditions and their impacts on ecosystems and people, but these models are not always shared in a format or scale that is useful for stakeholders’ needs. As a result, the models may be underutilized. This project aims to make existing and future climate data and models more useful for stakeholders’ climate planning goals and objectives.  

The research team will conduct focused, multi-week observations of decision-makers in regional agencies to identify how they currently use climate data and models, what unmet needs they may have, and whether there are barriers to more fully integrating climate data into their decisions. The research team will also conduct surveys, interviews, and usability experiments to identify the factors involved in stakeholders’ decisions to use climate data. The project will examine the heuristics (or mental shortcuts) commonly used to think about and communicate climate data that has high spatial and temporal resolution, high dimensionality (e.g. many future scenarios), and high numerical complexity (e.g. a complex distribution of future possibilities). These experimental and observational results will be used to inform the design of a web tool that will present existing climate data and models tailored to stakeholders’ needs. Results of this project will help South Central CASC efforts to make climate data and models more accessible and understandable to better support stakeholders’ planning efforts.