Reflections on an interdisciplinary collaboration to inform public understanding of climate change, mitigation, and impacts

Abstract

We describe two interdisciplinary projects in which natural scientists and engineers, as well as psychologists and other behavioral scientists, worked together to better communicate about climate change, including mitigation and impacts. One project focused on understanding and informing public perceptions of an emerging technology to capture and sequester carbon dioxide from coal-fired power plants, as well as other low-carbon electricity-generation technologies. A second project focused on public understanding about carbon dioxide’s residence time in the atmosphere. In both projects, we applied the mental-models approach, which aims to design effective communications by using insights from interdisciplinary teams of experts and mental models elicited from intended audience members. In addition to summarizing our findings, we discuss the process of interdisciplinary collaboration that we pursued in framing and completing both projects. We conclude by describing what we think we have learned about the conditions that supported our ongoing interdisciplinary collaborations.

Climate change research and the search for solutions: rethinking interdisciplinarity

“…Research has already identified characteristics of effective interdisciplinary collaborations on climate change. For example, Bruine de Bruin and Morgan ( 2019 ) draw on a technique called ‘mental models’ to focus on reorienting collaborations around a common goal and a joint methodology, using improved communication between researchers and their audience, something also underscored by Leigh and Brown ( 2021 ) in their study in interdisciplinary projects. Klink et al ( 2017 ) suggest that the key to good interdisciplinary work is continuous evaluation of how researchers interact with each other, the project and the outputs.…”

Evaluating science communication

“…Scientific communicators seek to be trusted partners of people making decisions where science matters. In this issue of PNAS, those include decisions about gene drives (50), autonomous vehicles (51), employment (52), and energy (53). Earning that trust means providing the science most relevant to decision makers' valued outcomes in comprehensible form and accessible places.…”

Discrepancy in scientific authority and media visibility of climate change scientists and contrarians

“…Understanding Earth’s coupled human–environmental systems requires broad and deep knowledge of processes occurring across a range of scales—from microscopic chemical processes to macroscopic thermodynamic flows and human consumption and land-use trends that span the entire global system 52 . The monumental task of drawing together and integrating expertise across numerous research domains will require intense trust-based collaboration across disciplinary, organizational, and political boundaries 35 . To this end, the consortium science framework 53 —whereby teams of teams organize around a common goal, with a mission to share returns both within and beyond organizational boundaries—is an appropriate model for facilitating cross-disciplinary knowledge exchange and achieving the transformative breakthroughs needed to address this grand challenge.…”

“…Accordingly, the literature on CC communication is multi-disciplinary. Research efforts draw on a wide range of methods that typically target a single entry point—such as applying content and meta-analysis methods to select collections of scientific publications 2,3,10,29 , news media articles 7–9,12,28,30–34 , or surveys 4,22,23 or by developing behavioral experiments and survey instruments 5,11,19,24,25,35 . For example, applying in-depth content analysis to select media article sets, researchers identified common factors among skeptical critics, estimated the percentage of CC articles that contain skeptical elements, and developed a typology of CC skeptics 30 .…”