Communicating uncertainty: lessons learned and suggestions for climate change assessment

Abstract

Assessments of climate change face the task of making information about uncertainty accessible and useful to decision-makers. The literature in behavior economics provides many examples of how people make decisions under conditions of uncertainty relying on inappropriate heuristics, leading to inconsistent and counterproductive choices. Modern risk communication practices recommend a number of methods to overcome these hurdles, which have been recommended for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports. This paper evaluates the success of the most recent IPCC approach to uncertainty communication, based on a controlled survey of climate change experts. Evaluating the results from the survey, and from a similar survey recently conducted among university students, the paper suggests that the most recent IPCC approach leaves open the possibility for biased and inconsistent responses to the information. The paper concludes by suggesting ways to improve the approach for future IPCC assessment reports.

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