Widening the common space to reduce the gap between climate science and decision-making in industry

Abstract

Climate change impacts lead to risks for natural and human systems. Climate sensitive decision-making in companies is vital to addressing the urgent need for making societies resilient to climate change and entailed risks. Providing and using state-of-the-art scientific knowledge in decision-making, an integral aspect of climate services, poses great challenges for climate scientists and decision-makers. This article aims to contribute to more informed decision-making processes in climate adaptation by addressing the question “How can climate scientists practically implement a transdisciplinary (TD) collaboration with an industry partner to reduce the gap between climate science and decision-making in industry?”. We present an engagement framework that provides guidance to address this question. This framework conceptualizes the engagement using two spheres of interests offering the opportunity to explore and widen their overlap as a common space. We present a case study where we apply this framework to a TD collaboration for climate service provision with a Swiss hydropower industry stakeholder; leading to four practical recommendations for effectively using the proposed framework: (1) Secure an anchor person at management level of the decision-maker entity, (2) Be prepared to invest time into triggering and maintaining active engagement by all collaborators, (3) From the start, communicate the open nature of insights and solutions from the engagement process, (4) Be aware that you are working in a field of tension. The presented engagement framework and practical recommendations are particularly beneficial for climate scientists that are not yet familiar with TD collaborations and enables co-development of bespoke climate services.

Keywords

• Research-practice collaboration
• Transdisciplinary
• Hydropower
• Usability gap
• Decision-making
• Climate change