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COP21 climate negotiators’ responses to climate model forecasts

Nature Climate Change volume 7, pages 185–190 (2017)Cite this article

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A Corrigendum to this article was published on 05 April 2017

This article has been updated

Abstract

Policymakers involved in climate change negotiations are key users of climate science. It is therefore vital to understand how to communicate scientific information most effectively to this group1. We tested how a unique sample of policymakers and negotiators at the Paris COP21 conference update their beliefs on year 2100 global mean temperature increases in response to a statistical summary of climate models’ forecasts. We randomized the way information was provided across participants using three different formats similar to those used in Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports2,3. In spite of having received all available relevant scientific information, policymakers adopted such information very conservatively, assigning it less weight than their own prior beliefs. However, providing individual model estimates in addition to the statistical range was more effective in mitigating such inertia. The experiment was repeated with a population of European MBA students who, despite starting from similar priors, reported conditional probabilities closer to the provided models’ forecasts than policymakers. There was also no effect of presentation format in the MBA sample. These results highlight the importance of testing visualization tools directly on the population of interest.

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Figure 1: Distribution of prior probabilities across temperature bins.
Figure 2: Different model forecast presentation formats.
Figure 3: Scatter plot of the prior and conditional probabilities across temperature bins.
Figure 4: Proportion of respondents whose conditional probability is closer to scientific information.

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Change history

  • 02 March 2017

    In the version of this Letter originally published, references 3 and 19 contained errors in the author names. These errors have been corrected after print.

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Acknowledgements

The research leading to these results received funding from the European Research Council through the two projects ERC-2013-StG no. 336703 RISICO and ERC-2013-StG no. 336155 COBHAM. We thank all respondents who took the time and effort to undertake the survey both at COP21 in Paris and at the Climate Change Strategy Role Play held through CEMS—The Global Alliance in Management Education.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Economic Department, Bocconi University, 20121 Milan, Italy

    Valentina Bosetti & Ning Liu

  2. Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei, 20136 Milan, Italy

    Valentina Bosetti, Loïc Berger, Ning Liu & Massimo Tavoni

  3. Department of Psychology, Princeton University, New Jersey 08540, USA

    Elke Weber

  4. IESEG School of Management, 59000 Lille, France

    Loïc Berger

  5. Department of Psychology, Fordham University, New York 10458, USA

    David V. Budescu

  6. Department of Management, Economics and Industrial Engineering, Politecnico di Milano, 20156 Milan, Italy

    Massimo Tavoni

Authors
  1. Valentina Bosetti
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  2. Elke Weber
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  3. Loïc Berger
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  4. David V. Budescu
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  5. Ning Liu
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  6. Massimo Tavoni
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Contributions

All authors were involved in planning the research and designing the experiments. V.B., E.W., L.B. and M.T. carried out the experiment. V.B., M.T. and N.L. analysed the results. All authors contributed to the writing of the paper.

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Correspondence to Valentina Bosetti.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Bosetti, V., Weber, E., Berger, L. et al. COP21 climate negotiators’ responses to climate model forecasts. Nature Clim Change 7, 185–190 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate3208

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