Abstract
By whom are national climate scenarios taken up, and which products are used? Despite numerous (national) climate scenarios being published by countries across the globe, studies of their actual uptake and application remain low. Analysing a survey and group interviews on the ways the Swiss climate scenarios CH2011 have been actually used by the Swiss adaptation community, we encoded the emerging differences in a new typology of observers, sailors, and divers. Taking an iceberg as a metaphor for climate scenarios, most respondents were sailors, accessing only key findings above the waterline (i.e., summary brochures). However, the vast majority of climate scenario data remains below the surface (i.e., downscaled climate model data), accessible only to the quarter of respondents labelled divers. Lastly, another quarter are observers, interested in the iceberg from afar, but without applying the climate information directly to their work. By describing three ways of using climate scenarios, we aim to clarify the often vague notion of ‘user’ circulating prominently in discussions around climate services and knowledge co-production. In addition, our results question the adequacy of simplifying climate scenario use by a user’s easily observable characteristics – such as being a researcher or practitioner, by sector or by numeracy. Our typology thus highlights the diversity of use(r)s within sectors or academia, but is also able to characterise various similarities of use(r)s between sectors, researchers and practitioners. Our findings assist in more nuanced and informed discussions of how ‘users’ are imagined and characterised in future developments of usable climate services.
Highlights
Analysing a survey and group interviews on the ways the Swiss climate scenarios CH2011 have been used by the Swiss adaptation community, we encoded the emerging differences in a new typology of observers, sailors, and divers
Climate services and climate information products are increasingly produced across the world
Taking the example of the Swiss national climate scenarios CH2011 (2011), we present three distinct ways CH2011 has been used by the Swiss adaptation community
Summary
Climate services and climate information products are increasingly produced across the world. Previous studies on ‘the users’ of climate information have often characterised these based on observable (i.e. independent) traits This includes distinguishing between researchers and practitioners; by comparing or focusing on sectors; or explaining the use of raw data with a user’s assumed numeracy (i.e. the ability to work with large quantitative datasets). Our typology of observers, sailors and divers highlights that there are similarities in what products – brochures and datasets – are used within such user categories. While our study supports efforts to tailor climate services to sectors or practitioners, our study recommends producing both brochures for sailors, and datasets for divers. Our analysis paints a heterogeneous picture of climate scenario use within sectors and among researchers and practitioners – and three surprisingly similar ways between such classifications
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