Managing the inconceivable: participatory assessments of impacts and responses to extreme climate change
A comprehensive understanding of the implications of extreme climate change requires an in-depth exploration of the perceptions and reactions of the affected stakeholder groups and the lay public. The project on “Atlantic sea level rise: Adaptation to imaginable worst-case climate change” (Atlantis) has studied one such case, the collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet and a subsequent 5-6 meter sea-level rise. Possible methods are presented for assessing the societal consequences of impacts and adaptation options in selected European regions by involving representatives of pertinent stakeholders. Results of a comprehensive review of participatory integrated assessment methods with a view to their applicability in climate impact studies are summarized including Simulation-Gaming techniques, the Policy Exercise method, and the Focus Group technique. Succinct presentations of these three methods are provided together with short summaries of relevant earlier applications to gain insights into the possible design options. Building on these insights, four basic versions of design procedures suitable for use in the Atlantis project are presented. They draw on design elements of several methods and combine them to fit the characteristics and fulfill the needs of addressing the problem of extreme sea-level rise. The selected participatory techniques and the procedure designs might well be useful in other studies assessing climate change impacts and exploring adaptation options.
The final, post-workshop phase of the process is the documentation, analysis, reporting, and publication of the results.
Participatory assessment methods for climate change studies:Simulation-gaming techniquesThe Policy exerciseThe Focus Group technique
Four designs are outlined as the most promising options: Ticking clockBack-castingClassic designOver and over again
Workshop phase divided in 4 main steps:Briefing of objectivesScenario sessionsDebriefing (reflection)Evaluation
The preparations phase includes interviews with would-be participants, the development of scenarios that outline both the sea-level-rise components and the background socioeconomic development patterns.
The paper presents the methodological foundations of key stakeholders’ discourses which process relevant region-specific information on the geophysical and socioeconomic trends and events through participatory assessment. ( For the project: “Atlantic sea-level rise: Adaptation to imaginable worst-case climate change”, the main objective is to understand: How do present-day predecessors of future generations possibly facing extreme sea-level rise (ESLR) perceive and deal with this risk.
Designs could be adopted in future climate impact and adaptation studies to explore the implications and identify the responses and their implementation in both gradually evolving impacts as well as extreme climate change.
Results indicate that participatory techniques can usefully complement formal methods of risk analysis and they are also valuable in exploring the risk perceptions and risk attitudes of key stakeholder groups if their delegates at the workshop correctly represent the wider community.The applications of participatory techniques to help relevant policymakers and stakeholders engage into a serious assessment of a remote and low-probability environmental risk proved to be successful.
Simulation-gaming techniques:- Involve suitable, problem-oriented combinations of a game, a simulation, and the reality to create a situation in which participants engage into playing pre-assigned or voluntarily chosen roles. Policy Exercise:- Combine expert reviews and policy interviews in the preparations phase, scenarios and group interaction techniques at the workshops, policy analysis and evaluation methods in the synthesis phase. Focus group:-Gather information about public perceptions and attitudes concerning climate change, impacts and policy preferences in a more systematic manner than traditional survey questionnaires or interviews.
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