Mapping engagement with climate adaptation information: What's used, by whom, and to do what?

"Climate science, and the services it provides, has never been more important.

As heatwaves, floods, wildfires, and other extreme weather events increase in frequency, severity, and duration, information is urgently needed on where climate impacts will be greatest (and when).

The UK Met Office, in response, has shifted its climate science away from only defining the problem to providing the solution: - In 2018, it released the UK climate projections to give decision-makers national tools and data to understand climate risks; and - In 2023, it launched the Climate Data Portal to distil the projections into resources to guide local climate action.

Despite these efforts, the use of climate information has been limited (Lemos et al. 2012).

Of concern is that the time, resources, capacity, and technical know-how needed to use these climate tools can prohibit who uses them and how they use them (Porter & Dessai 2017).

In turn, how information is formatted (probabilities, percentages, stories) plays an important role (Donovan et al. 2019).

If left unaddressed, a gap will widen between those that can and cannot assess their risks, and a domino effect will develop as failure to tackle risks cascades indiscriminately to affect everyone (Lorenz et al. 2019).

Limited budgets too often mean a one-size-fits-all approach is used to produce climate information (Tang & Dessai 2012). Such approaches can ignore the diversity of users and uses. That is, there are different types of users, with different priorities, and different aptitudes for using information.

To tackle this, scholars have called on scientists and decision-makers to co-produce climate information (Meadow et al. 2015).

Some researchers have designed 'how-to' guides to improve the use and usability of climate information (Beier et al. 2017).

Such work, however, fails to acknowledge: - That a subtle yet important distinction exists between climate information that is 'usable' and 'used' (Porter et al. 2015); and - Just because something is usable does not mean it will be used (Porter & Clark 2023). There are many barriers that impede the use of climate information.

But to understand which barriers matter most, and what actions are needed to overcome them, it's crucial to first understand what constitutes 'use'. Intuitive as it may sound, does 'use' mean the full, partial, or minimum use of information?

A strict adherence to how the information was originally intended to be used, or the flexibility to reinterpret the use for other purposes? Or the ability to trace which decisions were informed by that information (and why)?

In essence, what defines 'use' depends on how climate information is used, the extent to which its used, who uses it, and what happens upon using it. These distinctions are key because users have different needs, face different decisions, and have different capacities.

Whilst Dewulf et al. (2020) has gone furthest in spelling out how competing decision logics "place different demands on the usability, use, and users of climate information" (Porter & Clark 2023: 85), it remains unclear which users fit into which logics, how users' needs differ between these logics, and which users fail to fit in, all of which resonates with ongoing debates over how to produce 'actionable knowledge' (Mach et al 2020).

Surprisingly, there are no studies that critically explore the relationship between the users, usability, and use of climate information.

Akin to Collins and Evans' (2007) Periodic Table of Expertise that sets out which experts to consult for which problems; climate scientists urgently need an evidence-based typology (the 3Us: users, usability, use) to inform how future climate tools are designed.

This typology will give the Met Office, and other climate teams around the world, insights into how to differentiate between user types (which users are over or under-represented) and the extent to which the use and user types are aligned (data ext