How best to communicate climate projections?

The past year has shown us how much we can be affected by extreme weather events and how much damage such events can cause. Scientists and government produce climate projections of the future to help organisations minimise such damages under a changing future climate. Are climate projections being communicated in a format that you can understand? Are there easier, more intuitive, ways of visualising and communicating the same information?

A research project at the University of Leeds, undertaken by Susanne Lorenz, formerly climate change adaptation officer at Derbyshire County Council, is exploring what works and what doesn’t work for people who need to make decisions to make their organisations and businesses more resilient and future-proof.

This project explores to what extent you understand and interpret visualisations of climate projections: are your needs being met? It is very important to understand your views and feed that back to the scientists. This research aims to improve scientific communication to help you and others better understand and interpret climate projections.

To this end a survey trialling a number of different climate visualisations to explore your views has been created. If you could spare 20 minutes then please click on the link below and take a look.

https://www.survey.leeds.ac.uk/climatevis

The survey will be open until the end of April 2013.

If you have any questions about the survey or the research project please contact Susanne Lorenz [email protected]