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A platform for research: civil engineering, architecture and urbanism
The Elephant in the Room: Engaging with Communities About Climate Change Uncertainty
The government of Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) provides climate projections for a range of important infrastructure design parameters. A partnership between Memorial University and the Government of NL, funded by Natural Resources Canada, aimed to train engineers and planners on how to use these data for infrastructure planning and design. After several workshops, it became clear that a significant obstacle to implementing some of these measures existed due to differing perceptions of uncertainty between stakeholders at the local level and technical experts. Effective communication between technical personnel and stakeholders must make explicit the meaning of “uncertainty” with which they are working for decisions to be made under uncertainty. Uncertainty in the sense of surprise suggests that it is important not to be faced with an event that was not known to be possible. This represents a risk perspective where uncertainty refers to known outcomes with unknown probabilities that is used by technical experts. There are robust methods to deal with risk from this scientific perspective, but decision makers at the local level feel unable to deal with this kind of uncertainty. A vulnerability perspective of uncertainty, with the sense of ignorance, suggests an aversion to being mistaken, particularly by an error that leads to a negative outcome, which is the meaning with which many stakeholders tend to work. This includes risk and probability, and also allows for ambiguity and vagueness that are qualitative sources of uncertainty. Clarifying these two senses allows for aleatory and epistemic sources to be more clearly defined and dealing with natural and model uncertainty can be put in perspective. The conversation can be shifted from the technical/engineering/scientific aspects of uncertainty to issues under the control of local stakeholders and decision makers. This shift facilitates the inclusion of local knowledge and greatly increases the chance of sustainable actions through a robust process of decision making.
The Elephant in the Room: Engaging with Communities About Climate Change Uncertainty
The government of Newfoundland and Labrador (NL) provides climate projections for a range of important infrastructure design parameters. A partnership between Memorial University and the Government of NL, funded by Natural Resources Canada, aimed to train engineers and planners on how to use these data for infrastructure planning and design. After several workshops, it became clear that a significant obstacle to implementing some of these measures existed due to differing perceptions of uncertainty between stakeholders at the local level and technical experts. Effective communication between technical personnel and stakeholders must make explicit the meaning of “uncertainty” with which they are working for decisions to be made under uncertainty. Uncertainty in the sense of surprise suggests that it is important not to be faced with an event that was not known to be possible. This represents a risk perspective where uncertainty refers to known outcomes with unknown probabilities that is used by technical experts. There are robust methods to deal with risk from this scientific perspective, but decision makers at the local level feel unable to deal with this kind of uncertainty. A vulnerability perspective of uncertainty, with the sense of ignorance, suggests an aversion to being mistaken, particularly by an error that leads to a negative outcome, which is the meaning with which many stakeholders tend to work. This includes risk and probability, and also allows for ambiguity and vagueness that are qualitative sources of uncertainty. Clarifying these two senses allows for aleatory and epistemic sources to be more clearly defined and dealing with natural and model uncertainty can be put in perspective. The conversation can be shifted from the technical/engineering/scientific aspects of uncertainty to issues under the control of local stakeholders and decision makers. This shift facilitates the inclusion of local knowledge and greatly increases the chance of sustainable actions through a robust process of decision making.
The Elephant in the Room: Engaging with Communities About Climate Change Uncertainty
Lecture Notes in Civil Engineering
Gupta, Rishi (editor) / Sun, Min (editor) / Brzev, Svetlana (editor) / Alam, M. Shahria (editor) / Ng, Kelvin Tsun Wai (editor) / Li, Jianbing (editor) / El Damatty, Ashraf (editor) / Lim, Clark (editor) / Daraio, J. A. (author)
Canadian Society of Civil Engineering Annual Conference ; 2022 ; Whistler, BC, BC, Canada
Proceedings of the Canadian Society of Civil Engineering Annual Conference 2022 ; Chapter: 73 ; 1149-1169
2023-08-17
21 pages
Article/Chapter (Book)
Electronic Resource
English
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