This event had taken place from Thursday 15 to Saturday 17 November at the UOC (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya), Barcelona.

Jeroen P. van der Sluijs, Werner Krauß, Diana Wildschut, Arjan Wardekker and Scott Bremer had represented CoCliServ in the symposium.

On the 2nd day, Jeroen P. van der Sluijs chaired the Panel 4 Knowledge Quality Assessment in climate adaptation.

Narratives of change and the prospects of  postnormal climate services (Werner Krauß)

In a recent op-ed, a renowned climate scientist compared the urgency of climate change with the sinking of the Titanic: there is no time left to discuss racism, sexual identity or cultural preferences when the ship is sinking. In my presentation, I will challenge this assumption and argue for ‘terrestrial policies’ as suggested by Bruno Latour. In the first part, I will discuss the above call for action in the light of diverging master narratives of change like the IPPC and the Pope’s encyclical. From here, I will illustrate the current dilemma of science- based politics at examples from an ongoing project about the co-production of climate services for action. Finally, I will discuss the potential of postnormal climate services in linking the geological, the atmospheric and the social in new ‘terrestrial’ ways.

Framing the future: using local narratives of change to explore future visions and knowledge needs for urban climate resilience (Arjan Wardekker)

Cities face increasing pressures from climate change, along with other challenges, and many aims to increase urban resilience to these. This inherently involves intersecting science & knowledge and societal preferences. Cities seek locally embedded knowledge that can help them achieve their goals.

In the CoCliServ project, we’re working with local communities in a bottom-up, transdisciplinary scenario/futures process. Rather than exploring the usefulness of climate knowledge for local contexts, we’re basing our approach in local ‘narratives of change’: how do people in a region, city or neighborhood experience weather and water in past, present and future. And what consequences does this have for framing the challenge of climate resilience?

These narratives are then used to explore future visions and scenarios. Critical moments and potential surprises in the scenarios are used to spot what knowledge might be useful and when. The Dutch city of Dordrecht is used as example.

What is high quality knowledge for climate adaptation? (Scott Bremer)

Climate adaptation research studies how communities adjust to rapid changes in the climate in the places they live. Adaptation is a social process dependent on numerous factors, including a knowledge base for interpreting, understanding and anticipating weather and seasons. But there are particular epistemological challenges to building high quality, practicable knowledge about a climate regime that is going beyond our experience. Adaptation research is fragmented across subfields that approach knowledge quality differently according to their focus; on adaptive governance, community-based adaptation, or climate services for instance. This oral presentation uses post-normal science as a critical concept for steering a review of what counts as high quality knowledge across the diverse adaptation literature. It assembles a consolidated set of knowledge quality criteria to more tightly delineate the field of ‘knowledge for climate adaptation’ and discusses the relative merits of these criteria for making a climate future that we can live with.

See the booklet of Abstracts