Development of a survey instrument to assess individual and organizational use of climate adaptation science

Abstract

Research that can improve the resilience of social and natural systems to climate change has become more common. Many climate adaptation science organizations and agencies now focus on actionable science, a model that aims to have greater impacts on policy and practice than traditionally produced and distributed science. However, evaluations of research projects are needed to examine and verify the impact of climate science on adaptation and society. Better understanding the types and mechanisms of impact will allow organizations to design, fund, and facilitate more useful climate adaptation science. Many existing actionable science evaluation approaches are qualitative in nature and take considerable time and effort for funders and administrators to implement. Quantitative methods could provide a valuable option for evaluation, specifically for making comparisons across many projects. Thus, we have designed a quantitative survey instrument for measuring the use of climate adaptation science. We designed the survey using best practices and iterative input from social scientists as well as climate adaptation scientists and practitioners. We then distributed the survey to a sample of users of climate adaptation science and analyzed those responses to further refine the survey. Quantitative and qualitative results show that use of climate adaptation science may be described as either individual use or organizational use, which contrasts with popular models of use in existing evaluation literature. The survey is made available for future efforts to evaluate and improve climate adaptation science and to advance efforts to measure different kinds of use.