Integrating Values to Improve the Relevance of Climate‐Risk Research

• Published in: Earth's future 2024-10, Vol.12 (10), p.n/a
• Main Authors: Helgeson, Casey, Keller, Klaus, Nicholas, Robert E., Srikrishnan, Vivek, Cooper, Courtney, Smithwick, Erica A. H., Tuana, Nancy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Climate adaptation; Climate change; climate risk analysis; Collaboration; co‐production; Design analysis; Environmental risk; Flood management; Pareto optimum; policy assessment; Research design; Risk assessment; Risk management; stakeholder values; Stakeholders; System dynamics
• ISSN: 2328-4277; 2328-4277
• DOI: 10.1029/2022EF003025

Climate risks are growing. Research is increasingly important to inform the design of risk‐management strategies. Assessing such strategies necessarily brings values into research. But the values assumed within research (often only implicitly) may not align with those of stakeholders and decision makers. These misalignments are often invisible to researchers and can severely limit research relevance or lead to inappropriate policy advice. Aligning strategy assessments with stakeholders' values requires a holistic approach to research design that is oriented around those values from the start. Integrating values into research in this way requires collaboration with stakeholders, integration across disciplines, and attention to all aspects of research design. Here we describe and demonstrate a qualitative conceptual tool called a values‐informed mental model (ViMM) to support such values‐centered research design. ViMMs map stakeholders' values onto a conceptual model of a study system to visualize the intersection of those values with coupled natural‐human system dynamics. Through this mapping, ViMMs integrate inputs from diverse collaborators to support the design of research that assesses risk‐management strategies in light of stakeholders' values. We define a visual language for ViMMs, describe accompanying practices and workflows, and present an illustrative application to the case of flood‐risk management in a small community along the Susquehanna river in the Northeast United States. Plain Language Summary Individuals, organizations, businesses, and governments face difficult choices about how to adapt to the changing climate. Research can help by, for example, providing insights about future climate conditions or showing how potential courses of action may play out under those conditions. But like all decisions, climate adaptation decisions are fundamentally driven by values. What do people want to achieve through adaptation? There are many answers to this question, and different people may care about different things. Research that evaluates possible adaptation outcomes on grounds different from what people actually care about may be useless or even harmful. To design good research on adaptation strategies, we need to collaborate with stakeholders, communicate across disciplines, and strike the right balance with practical limitations on time, resources, and scientific feasibility. In this article, we present a framework for designing climate‐risk re