Research resource review

I Introduction

The climate information landscape is crowded: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reviewed 9200 papers in just the first volume of its most recent report (IPCC, 2013). In addition, there are countless media sound bites and blogs that present a range of views and opinions about climate change, its scientific basis and the actions that can or should be taken. Decision-makers need to navigate through this landscape to extract climate change information for different time horizons, at different spatial scales and with different levels of detail to support a variety of decisions. Providing this information is a considerable challenge.

An emerging medium for communicating climate science that attempts to bridge the gap between scientists and decision-makers is the Climate Change Impacts Report Card (CCIRC). Here we provide an overview of available CCIRCs, describing what they are and what they deliver, and reflecting on their purpose. We consider how they are produced and presented, and whether we are able to assess their effectiveness in supporting decision-making for adaptation.

II What are report cards?

Report cards have been compiled for a range of activities: the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)’s Arctic Report Card (NOAA, 2013) presents observed climate changes of the Arctic environmental system. Such information is similar to state of the environment reporting and can be a way of informing decision-makers about where to target effort. Report cards have also been developed to score organizations on their climate change achievements against carbon reduction targets (e.g. the National Wildlife Federation’s Six Month Progress Report; NWF, 2014). However, our overview is specifically focused on report cards designed to support good decision-making around adaptation that have a set of common features typically including historic observations of change as well as future impacts.

We consider the following CCIRCs:

Marine Climate Change Impacts Partnership’s (MCCIP) fourth ‘Marine climate change impacts’ report card (MCCIP, 2013a) for the UK.

Living with Environmental Change’s (LWEC) ‘Terrestrial biodiversity climate change impacts’ report card (Morecroft and Speakman, 2013) for the UK.

LWEC’s ‘Water climate change impacts’ report card (Watts and Anderson, 2013) for the UK.

National Climate Change Adaptation Research Facility’s (NCCARF) ‘Terrestrial report card 2013: Climate change impacts and adaptation on Australian biodiversity’ (NCCARF, 2013).

CSIRO and NCCARF’s second ‘Marine climate change in Australia’ report card (Poloczanska et al., 2012).

These CCIRCs are aimed at decision-makers in a specific geographical region (target audience), present the latest understanding of the impacts of observed and future climate change on a topic of interest (narrow focus), are freely available in a short format and are compiled by scientific experts and decision-makers (multi-institutional authorship) but are led by decision-making organizations.

III What is the role of report cards?

Most CCIRCs attempt to provide an account of the latest understanding and new developments in climate impact science in a ‘short, comprehensive, quality assured, high-level assimilation of knowledge set out in a visually impacting way that would enable the results to be quickly and easily understood and used by policy advisors, [and] decision-makers’ (MCCIP, 2013b). Scale and focus are important and these tend to be at a national scale and on a specific aspect of the environment.

It may be no coincidence that CCIRCs have appeared in the UK and Australia, as they are countries that have pioneered the development of national climate scenarios (CSIRO and Bureau of Meteorology, 2007; Murphy et al., 2009). However, while the provision of future projections of atmospheric and oceanographic variables is a useful first step, many more steps are usually required to derive decision-relevant information about impacts on such things as floods, droughts, heatwaves and managing biodiversity.

The UK CCIRCs concentrate on providing scientific information and are focused on informing the audience of the current state of knowledge. For example, ‘Winter rainfall in England and Wales has increased since the 1760s, but with little change over the last 50 years’ (Watts and Anderson, 2013: 12). The Australian report cards go further, including information on adaptation actions that are happening now and possible future measures that may be required. For example, the Terrestrial Biodiversity report card (NCCARF, 2013) states that management intervention will be required to increase resilience and maintain ecosystem services, and lists seven possible adaptation options under landscape management and species-specific management. This is a useful addition if CCIRCs are attempting to inform adaptation decision-making. Irrespective of these differences, the development of national climate scenarios may have facilitated the subsequent production of CCIRCs, both enabling and requiring the dissemination of the information.

In describing observations, projections and current knowledge, CCIRCs also identify gaps in the evidence base. As a result, they may help to set the agenda for future research as well as sharing the concerns of decision-makers and stakeholders to help target or prioritize future research. Updated CCIRCs provide some tracking of impacts and our growing understanding or knowledge in an area. CCIRCs, and some of the underpinning research papers, also provide comprehensive reviews and constitute a research resource.

IV How are report cards produced?

CCIRCs, like other forms of science communication (e.g. peer-reviewed journal articles, conference papers, science briefings), are written by scientists but in this case led by organizations at the interface between science and policy. The co-production of the report card, commissioned by decision-makers and co-written with scientists, provides a strong platform for decision-relevant information to be produced that also stands up to scientific scrutiny.

The overall structure of CCIRCs we review here is similar despite each focusing on particular climate change impacts and a specific geographical area. High-level messages with graphics are followed by a description of the process for the development of the report card. This is then followed by detailed statements about the current state of the environment and possible futures accompanied by an assessment of confidence level in the statements (apart from the Terrestrial Biodiversity of Australia card). The statements are either supported directly by existing peer-reviewed literature or by peer-reviewed contributing papers specifically commissioned to inform the report cards; the latter are available for free. For LWEC’s Water CCIRC, an additional level of information is available: a summary paper (Watts et al., 2014) that sits between the report card and contributing papers. This tiered approach follows a journalistic style of reporting, giving the reader several levels from which to tackle the information depending on their interest or need. This leaves a concise (the longest is 24 pages – LWEC’s Terrestrial Biodiversity Report Card), high-level wrapper or front-end that is available online.

One of the major obstacles in representing climate change information is that of uncertainty. With the exception of the Terrestrial Biodiversity of Australia card, the CCIRCs follow a similar approach to that adopted by the IPCC in their assessment reports where confidence levels are attached to each of the statements. For the MCCIP and LWEC CCIRCs, these are based on the level of agreement and the amount of evidence available. This procedure is described clearly in the documents and results in a low, medium or high confidence level rating. The method used to rate the confidence level in the Marine Climate Change in Australia report card is not described. At present, there is some debate surrounding the use of uncertainty to inform decision-making with an increasing number of scientists, politicians and policy-makers preferring the language of risk (Painter, 2013). Advocates argue that it is couched in the everyday experience and offers a more sophisticated language for discussing climate change (Painter, 2013).

V How effective are CCIRCs?

The report card format conveys complex climate change impacts information for supporting evidence-based decision-making and stems from significant efforts to make information accessible, scientifically credible and relevant. CCIRCs are a major undertaking, but it is not yet clear how useful they have been in supporting good decision-making.

If the aim is to communicate the science to decision-makers more effectively and provide relevant information that can be used in decisions, then an evaluation of this in practice could be useful; especially given that plans are already in place to produce other CCIRCs, for example on health and infrastructure in the UK. The MCCIP report card supported by Government and Conservation Agencies has been published four times (2006, 2008, 2010 and 2013). It inspired similar products like NCCARF’s Marine Climate Change in Australia report card which has been published twice (in 2009 and 2012) and shows that, in some ways, the format has been successful. It also suggests that to remain accessible and relevant for decision-makers, a CCIRC needs to be hosted, and updates led, by an umbrella organization; although update frequency should be considered carefully as a proliferation of report cards with limited new knowledge may be counter-productive.

It is more difficult to assess whether CCIRCs have enabled better or more proactive adaptive decision-making. Such an assessment may need to reflect on the performance of sectors without such information or a wider assessment of how climate information supports decision-making more generally. It may be helpful to have a framework for evaluating the success of different sectors/organizations to take account of and embed climate change into their planning.

We contend that CCIRCs and the underpinning technical papers are a useful research resource in themselves. The process of producing the CCIRCs also provides a platform for researchers to gain a greater understanding of what decision-makers need and the questions they are grappling with, facilitating knowledge exchange more readily. They can clearly help identify research gaps and potentially influence research funding.

CCIRCs are a good example of attempts to translate research output into a more accessible form, to bring research to a wider audience and potentially ensure research has a greater impact – characteristics that are increasingly attractive to research funders. The platform could be a useful vehicle for other areas of academic research where active engagement with decision-makers would help address problems faced by society or facilitate better uptake of research. The principles used in developing CCIRCs (outlined earlier) could usefully be applied to all publicly funded research.

CCIRCs, as a communication tool, could better support adaptation if they informed the audience about not only impacts and risks but also what can be done to manage those risks. Synthesizing current understanding of climate change adaptation actions at a national level is a challenging one, as demonstrated by the 464-page scientific report (CCRA, 2012) used to support the UK’s national adaptation programme. A CCIRCs approach could be a useful platform for knowledge exchange and direct influencing of decisions around climate change adaptation. A useful step in the right direction is the MCCIP (2014) guide aimed at the marine leisure industry based on the results of a workshop, which includes suggestions for a number of adaptation responses.

We support CCIRCs as a medium for bridging the gap between science and decision-making, but suggest three actions for their improvement. First, the process should include, from the outset, a mechanism for updating the information at appropriate intervals. Second, attempts should be made to evaluate the effectiveness of CCIRCs in supporting good adaptation decisions. Finally, we suggest that future report cards would benefit from more information on adaptation already underway to monitor progress and inspire further action.