Invited Presentation: Narrative Descriptions to Improve the Salience of Climate Projections to Policy and Planning

Over the last twenty years both seasonal and long-term climate model projections have been used in policy and planning. Though there are some policy and planning successes, we remain without national and international policies to address climate change, and there are documented barriers to the use of climate projections in adaptation planning. From the point of view of scientists, it is often argued that increased spatial resolution and reduction of uncertainty is required to increase the usability of climate projections. However, research on how decision makers have successfully used climate projections suggest that these technical, quantitative improvements are not the primary attributes that need to be addressed to reduce the barriers to the use of climate knowledge in policy and planning. Increasingly, there is realization that translational narratives are needed to increase the salience of climate-model projections to decision-making frameworks. This talk discusses the need for integrated quantitative and qualitative knowledge to accelerate the use of climate science in policy and planning. Strategies for addressing this co-development of knowledge are introduced.