Using a Climate Change Risk Perceptions Framing to Identify Gaps in Climate Services

Abstract

Given the rise in climate services for decision-making, it is important to understand whether these services are meeting the context-specific needs of decision-makers, including identifying any gaps in current climate services. This study sets out to investigate the efficacy of current climate services provision in east Africa through the lens of climate change risk perceptions. Risk perceptions have established relationships with important aspects of the decision context and have been shown to influence the kinds of information people use in making decisions, therefore, an understanding of how elements of risk perceptions relate to climate services use can provide valuable insights for enhancing climate services. Using this premise, the relationships between determinants of climate change risk perceptions and the use of climate services information are explored through a combination of statistical survey analysis and qualitative interview analysis. The analysis revealed three main gaps in climate services in east Africa. These gaps include the lack of long-term climate change projections disseminated through National Meteorological Services (NMS), limited locally ground-truthed delivery of impact-based forecasts and the requirement for specialist capacity to use some complex climate services. Filling these gaps will require enhanced collaboration between the NMS, other providers of climate-related information (such as research institutes) and the practitioner and user communities in order to facilitate the coordinated delivery of locally ground-truthed impact-based forecasts, facilitate capacity development across the user-producer spectrum and augment the role of the NMS as conduits of climate change information.

Flood, fires, and drought: Do we have the tools to risk‐assess for environmental management of extreme climatic events?

“…Standardized metrics are essential in climate risk assessments for better comparability, quality, and credibility (Hoch & Trigg, 2019). With today's technological advancement, satellite data, artificial intelligence, and remote sensing are valuable tools for risk management and preparedness as they offer advanced tools for real-time monitoring that could be useful in early warning notifications, prediction, and comprehensive analysis of environmental changes and potential hazards (Abid et al, 2021;Sun et al, 2020). While these tools have limitations, they remain beneficial for integrated climatic risk assessments.…”

“…Despite significant advancements in methodologies and tools for assessing climate‐related risks, there are still several major knowledge gaps in the field. One gap is limited scientifically sound locally relevant climate risk indicators and tools to derive risk metrics (Steynor & Pasquini, 2022). There is also a lack of understanding of the socioeconomic impacts of region‐specific global change risks, such as climatic changes in the northern regions, where effects are more pronounced.…”

Perspectives on climate information use in the Caribbean

“…An understanding of local factors that hinder and promote the effective use of climate information in decision-making is deemed critical within the wider literature (e.g., Lemos et al, 2012;Kirchhoff, 2013;Vaughan and Dessai, 2014;Brugger et al, 2016;Nissan et al, 2019;Guido et al, 2020). These considerations fall broadly within the wider context of utilizing climate change risk perceptions as a framing tool to understand and evaluate climate services (Jones et al, 2015;Steynor and Pasquini, 2022), as well as discussions relating to the knowledge and reasoning capacities of individual to form relevant risk perceptions (Kahan et al, 2011). We contrast this context with the concept of reception, relating to the manner, way and/or quality in which climate information is received by the user (Hahn et al, 2016), as well as the framework of credibility (relating to scientific adequacy of the information and/or the credentials of the information providers), salience (referring to comprehension and access), and legitimacy (relating to perceived levels of representation, bias and/or participation in the information process) of scientific information (Cash et al, 2003;Guido et al, 2020).…”