The unpredictable truth: A proposed roadmap for a 'reflect-then-act' approach to climate uncertainties and lessons learned from Norwegian municipalities

2022 Weather, Climate, and Society  
Several papers have through the years criticized climate policy decision making for being naïve with respect to how they view climate model outputs as objective facts and use the outputs directly to program policies. From this and similar observations, many of the papers conclude that there is a need for shifting to a new approach on how climate policymakers may relate to climate change uncertainties. The article proposes such a shift by presenting a roadmap on how to address uncertainties in
more » ... imate change adaptation. It consists of three major elements: Firstly, to accept that in many cases we will not be able to reduce climate change uncertainties. Secondly, to diversify the way in which we describe climate change uncertainties, moving from a one-dimensional technical perspective to a multi-dimensional perspective which applies uncertainties also to social and political processes and systems. Thirdly, to change the way we address climate change uncertainties by moving from a predict-then-act to a reflect-then-act approach, implying that we must adapt to climate change even under high and various forms of uncertainties. Embedded in this last point is to accept unlike that of climate change mitigation, the precautionary principle will apply in many situations of climate change adaptation. In the last part of the article the usability of the proposed roadmap is demonstrated post-ante on four Norwegian cases of climate related natural hazard events.
doi:10.1175/wcas-d-21-0078.1 fatcat:kgntygn36zfqzeamcj53lyzxhq