Abstract
Adaptation to climate change is becoming more urgent, but the wealth of knowledge that informs adaptation planning and decision-making is not used to its full potential. Top-down approaches to knowledge production are identified as one important reason for the gap between science and practice and are criticized for not meeting the needs of intended users. In response to this challenge, there is a growing interest in the creation of user-oriented and actionable climate services to support adaptation. At the same time, recent research suggests that greater efforts are needed to evaluate the effectiveness of knowledge co-production processes and the best criteria by which to gauge the quality of knowledge outcomes, while also considering different stakeholder perspectives. This paper explores these issues through a critical assessment of the quality of knowledge for adaptation generated from a climate services co-design process in two case studies in Sweden. The study draws on experiences from a 5-year research collaboration in which natural and social science researchers, together with local stakeholders, co-designed climate services to support climate adaptation planning and decision-making. The well-established knowledge quality criteria of credibility, legitimacy, saliency, usability, and usefulness remain relevant, but are not sufficient to capture factors relating to whether and how the knowledge actually is applied by climate change adaptation planners and decision-makers. We observe that case-specific circumstances beyond the scope of the co-design process, including the decision-making context as well as non-tangible outcomes, also play crucial roles that should be accounted for in the knowledge assessment processes.
Highlights
Despite a strong increase in climate change impact and adaptation research and practice over the past decade, the wealth of knowledge and experience is seldom used to its full potential in climate change adaptation planning and decision-making
Most critical factors–representing different elements of the co-design process–that contributed positively or negatively to addressing the criteria are outlined
Note that trust is not explicitly mentioned under section Elements of the Co-design process that contributed to addressing the adaptation knowledge quality criteria but part of results in sections Perceptions of adaptation knowledge quality: City of Stockholm and Perceptions of adaptation knowledge quality: Karlstad Municipality
Summary
Despite a strong increase in climate change impact and adaptation research and practice over the past decade, the wealth of knowledge and experience is seldom used to its full potential in climate change adaptation planning and decision-making. This gap between research and action (Klein and Juhola, 2014; Palutikof et al, 2019) signals that there is a lack of actionable knowledge to support. Climate information providers have been shown to have incomplete understanding of decision contexts (McNie, 2007) and narrow perceptions of user types (Porter and Dessai, 2017). There is empirical evidence that a scientific approach to, and differential understanding of, uncertainty and technical information may confuse rather than help decision-makers (Patt and Dessai, 2005; Porter and Dessai, 2017; Christel et al, 2018)
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