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- Title
Increasing Trust in Climate Vulnerability Projections.
- Authors
Ford, James D.
- Abstract
Projecting future trends is emerging as a key focus of community‐based climate vulnerability assessments. In these mostly qualitative studies, understanding of current vulnerability processes is used as a basis for identifying who and what are vulnerable to future changes, where, and why, and characterizing the key drivers of vulnerability and how they might change. Few, if any, of these studies engage with approaches for validating findings, reflecting the difficulties of validating mostly qualitative projections of highly uncertain futures, absence of directly measurable vulnerability outcomes, and lack of data on vulnerability drivers. Given the challenges of projecting future trends, this absence undermines trust in such work and limits opportunities to learn. This paper illustrates, with examples, how validation can be incorporated into the study design of community‐based climate vulnerability assessments through: (a) examination of retrospective projections to assess projection skill, (b) evaluation of projections made for future time periods which have since passed for consistency with what actually happened, (c) comparison of projections with empirical research that attempts to understand and constrain the effects of climate change using observed effects of weather variation, and (d) incorporation of demonstrated "best practices" into projection development, such as acknowledgment of areas of uncertainty, integration of diverse viewpoints, and utilization of multiple sources of information. Plain Language Summary: Projections are widely used in a variety of fields to anticipate, identify, and characterize how the future may evolve, and have been a central feature in climate change research within the natural sciences. Their development and use to understand if and how communities are vulnerable to climate change, however, is more recent, with such work describing potential future climate vulnerabilities and the pathways leading to them, and are mostly developed within the social sciences. This paper argues that such "community‐based" work needs to look to the experience of other fields which have a wealth of experience of how to build trust and legitimacy into projection development processes. One such way is through projection validation, which in the context of largely qualitative community‐based work could include continually evaluating how well projections are performing as the future unfolds; evaluation of projections made for future time periods which have since passed for consistency with what actually happened and ensuring demonstrated "best practices" are incorporated into projection development, such as acknowledgment of areas of uncertainty, integration of diverse viewpoints, and utilization of multiple sources of information. Key Points: Projecting climate vulnerability at a community‐level is a rapidly growing area of researchThe importance of validating vulnerability projections is increasingly recognized in the literature although underutilized in practice, particularly within qualitative researchThere are opportunities to build external and internal validation approaches into processes through which community vulnerability projections are developed
- Subjects
CLIMATE research; INFORMATION resources; BEST practices; EMPIRICAL research
- Publication
Earth's Future, 2024, Vol 12, Issue 4, p1
- ISSN
2328-4277
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1029/2023EF003655