Susanne Lorenz

The new Local Authority Climate Service (LACS) (launched in October 2024) offers a novel method of delivering UK climate projection information to end users. The LACS has been developed in response to a need from Local Authorities (LAs) for clear and authoritative information to raise awareness on the need to adapt to climate change, identifying and justifying priority risks and opportunities, and gathering evidence to support adaptation planning. The LACS platform enables LAs to: access ready-to-use climate information for their local area, develop a climate report summarising key results for awareness raising, obtain helpful resources and further support for adaptation planning. To explore how this method of delivering climate information is being used, tailored and communicated by users, twenty-two interviews were conducted between December 2024 and March 2025 with staff at Local and Combined Authorities in the UK. These were semi-structured, online interviews each lasting approx. 1 hour. We employed thematic analysis on the interview transcripts to explore current engagement with and anticipated use of the LACS, user feedback on functionality and usability of the service, as well as specific insights on the use of the LACS to progress organisational adaptation. Subsequently, the insights of these interviews fed into the development of three case studies which outline the current practical use of LACS in adaptation at the local level. The findings provide key insights for other European national met organisations or other climate service providers supporting adaptation and resilience planning at the local scale. Municipal planners need easy to access, easy to understand and easy to apply climate information, that moves beyond just greater granularity but considers climate change in the form of changing impacts relevant to their service delivery. Moving climate data away from the highly technical to the highly useable.

Planning for adaptation to climate change is often regarded to be a local imperative and considered to be more effective if grounded on a solid evidence base and recognisant of relevant climate projections. Research has already documented some of the challenges of making climate information usable in decision-making but has not yet sufficiently reflected on the role of the wider institutional and regulatory context. This article examines the impact of the external institutional context on the use and usability of climate projections in local government through an analysis of 44 planning and climate change (adaptation) documents and 54 semi-structured interviews with planners in England and Germany conducted between July 2013 and May 2014. We show that there is little demand for climate projections in local adaptation planning in either country due to existing policy, legal and regulatory frameworks. Local government in England has not only experienced a decline in use of climate projections, but also the waning of the climate change adaptation agenda more widely, amidst changes in the planning and regulatory framework and severe budget cuts. In Germany, spatial planning makes substantial use of past and present climate data, but the strictly regulated nature of planning prevents the use of climate projections, due to their inherent uncertainties. Findings from the two countries highlight that if we are to better understand the usability of climate projections, we need to be more aware of the institutional context within which planning decisions are made. Otherwise we run the risk of continuing to provide tools and information that are of limited use within their intended context.

Visualizations are widely used in the communication of climate projections. However, their effectiveness has rarely been assessed among their target audience. Given recent calls to increase the usability of climate information through the tailoring of climate projections, it is imperative to assess the effectiveness of different visualizations. This paper explores the complexities of tailoring through an online survey conducted with 162 local adaptation practitioners in Germany and the UK. The survey examined respondents’ assessed and perceived comprehension (PC) of visual representations of climate projections as well as preferences for using different visualizations in communicating and planning for a changing climate. Comprehension and use are tested using four different graph formats, which are split into two pairs. Within each pair the information content is the same but is visualized differently. We show that even within a fairly homogeneous user group, such as local adaptation practitioners, there are clear differences in respondents’ comprehension of and preference for visualizations. We do not find a consistent association between assessed comprehension and PC or use within the two pairs of visualizations that we analysed. There is, however, a clear link between PC and use of graph format. This suggests that respondents use what they think they understand the best, rather than what they actually understand the best. These findings highlight that audience-specific targeted communication may be more complex and challenging than previously recognized.

Many European countries have developed National Adaptation Strategies (NAS) to guide adaptation to the expected impacts of climate change. There is a need for more structured communication of the uncertainties related to future climate and its impacts so that adaptation actions can be planned and implemented effectively and efficiently. We develop a novel uncertainty assessment framework for comparing approaches to the inclusion and communication of physical science uncertainty, and use it to analyse ten European NAS. The framework is based on but modifies and integrates the notion of the “cascade of uncertainties” and the NUSAP (Numeral Unit Spread Assessment Pedigree) methodology to include the overarching assessment categories of Numerical Value, Spread, Depth and Substantiation. Our assessment indicates that there are marked differences between the NAS in terms of inclusion and communication of physical science uncertainty. We find that there is a bias towards the communication of quantitative uncertainties as opposed to qualitative uncertainties. Through the examination of the English and German NAS, we find that similar stages of development in adaptation policy planning can nevertheless result in differences in handling physical science uncertainty. We propose that the degree of transparency and openness on physical science uncertainty is linked to the wider socio-political context within which the NAS are framed. Our methodology can help raise awareness among NAS users about the explicit and embedded information on physical science uncertainty within the existing NAS and would help to design more structured uncertainty communication in new or revised NAS.