A new study explores how to deliver climate risk data that is useful to people making local adaptation decisions.
Our new paper highlights the challenge faced by local organisations when accessing information to inform climate adaptation decisions.
Published in the journal Climate Risk Management, the article identifies that readily understandable climate risk information is a significant barrier to adaptation planning by local decision makers.
‘Adaptation decisions are place-based and so for information to be useful to decision makers, it has to be accessible and relevant to their sphere of influence’ said Adam Smith, lead author of the paper.
Climate risk by county
During workshops with local stakeholders during the OpenCLIM project, researchers found that local adaptation decisions need locally-relevant desktop information. Most currently available information is about climate impacts, difficult to interpret, and is not framed as local climate risk.
This has prompted the ongoing development of local climate risk reports at county-scale, based on national climate risk maps generated through OpenCLIM. These simple PDF reports are being evaluated by stakeholders before a full set of reports are completed across the UK. The full set will be available later this year.
The authors recommend that a single, nationally coordinated data portal would help local users to identify the risk information they require. This could potentially be added to the scope of the UK National Data Library, currently under development by the UK Government.
‘By providing region-specific data in accessible formats, we are helping to bridge the adaptation gap between national-level data and on-the-ground decision making’ said Asher Minns, Executive Director of the Tyndall Centre, who works closely with local climate policy makers and stakeholders.
- Read the study in the journal Climate Risk Management, ‘Reflections on delivering place-based climate risk data in support of local adaptation decisions’
- Explore the reports and OpenCLIM project
