Climate services raise a range of ethical concerns in the framing, conceptualization construction, tailoring, and delivery of information. While there is increasing awareness and acknowledgement of the broad issue, there is little deliberation over how to manage these ethical concerns or how they should be dealt with. For instance, there is potential for recipients of climate services to misinterpret complex information and make decisions based on this erroneous interpretation, which can lead to significantly harmful consequences. What obligations do climate services providers have to ensure that recipients understand and do not misinterpret information? Furthermore, for decision makers to make well informed decisions they need to be made aware of the uncertainties and assumptions inherent in the science. How should scientific uncertainty be represented and unpacked, firstly so that it is an honest representation of scientist’s confidence, and secondly, so that recipients are able to comprehend and interpret the uncertainty correctly? How do we manage the reality that scientists and decision makers bring different professional and personal values to play in the process of constructing and using information? To some extent the nature of the information produced is a consequence of who produced it, as is clearly evidenced by the divergent messages emerging from different climate services offerings. There are also further questions such as how to ensure the equitable distribution of climate services amongst the community so that the benefit of climate services are not focused on one sector or socio-economic grouping within society.
Given this background, this NRF funded project enabled the actors in climate services in South Africa to come together in a reflective process and develop a community of practice to begin the discourse around the ethical practice of climate services implementation. The objectives of the project were to:
- Raise awareness and build capacity in climate services ethics across a wide range of actors in the climate services field in South Africa including the public and private sectors.
- Collaboratively explore the ethical issues inherent in the South African context with a view to suggesting principles or actions to address these issues going forward
- Establish a community of practice to provide an ongoing support network for collectively addressing the challenges of working in the application of climate services as well as providing a collective problem-solving community in order to build capacity in implementation of this emerging field
- Provide preliminary resources to enable the training of emerging researchers on the realities of carrying out climate services and the ethical considerations that this requires.
Download the REPORT and the POLICY BRIEF below:
- Policy Brief – Ethical challenges in climate services
- Final Report – Ethical challenges in climate services
Additional resources:
- CSAG Climate Frontiers Podcast – The Ethics of Climate Services
- CSAG E-Learning Module – Climate Services Ethics
Time frame: 1 year project, from March 2020 to March 2021
Funder: South African National Research Foundation
Partners: Climate System Analysis Group, South African Department of Environment, Forestry and Fisheries, South African Weather Service, University of the Witwatersrand, Red Cross Red Crescent Climate Centre
For further details: Contact Anna Steynor