Communicating climate change and biodiversity loss with local populations: Exploring communicative utopias in eight transdisciplinary case studies

Date: 23 March 2023

Handling Editor: Prof Sarah Bell and Prof Dan Osborn

Editorial decision: Request revision. The Handling Editor requested revisions; the article has been returned to the authors to make this revision with the following points to consider:

This is an interesting attempt to extract meaning from a set of completed case studies. The a posteriori nature of the study present some challenges and I hope these comments help deal with those. 

1. The author's attention has already been drawn to the need to increase the level of reflexivity in their considerations. I would point to comments in relation to elders in the Amazon area "only" being interested in the carbon price and not the research findings. It is a commonplace in policy and decision-making that those who make decisions often focus mostly on economic benefits and are much less interested in the research. However, examples are rarely documented. This rather throwaway line is actually a finding worth reporting more distinctly. It may be apparent in the other case-studies as well and could be a theme of the paper.
2. Each case study needs to make clear what aspect of climate change science was being presented to the different communities, what aspect of climate change was the focus of the case study (e.g. mitigation or adaptation; floods or droughts), how the climate science was seen by the communities. This would help draw the disparate case studies into a simple framework that could be built on by others.
3. The way the Table assessing each case study was drawn up is unclear - this needs to be improved. The use of crosses and colours appears inconsistent. Are the colours actually needed - if so they need explanation. The crosses need explanation also. Thes explanations could be in the main text or in the Table legend.
4. A new Table is required or even two new Tables. One should draw out the limitations of the case studies and list these. As written there really are some quite glaring issues with the way some of the case studies have been done - such as a lack of interpreters for local dialects and that to me is just the kind of thing that needs documentation. The Table might help justify the rankings given to projects in the current Table which rather appears out of the blue as an opinion without evidential material to support it. A second new Table - essential in my view - should document the general lessons learnt from the case-studies that other communities, researchers or funding agencies could use to make progress in dealing with climate change. This would make the paper much more important and citable as it would then overcome a real problem with case study reports which is a fundamental tendency to fail to synthesise lessons learnt and analyse these so that future actions are better. A Table of further suggested actions would also be useful but maybe that is asking too much of one paper.

Date: 21 July 2022

Handling Editor: Prof Sarah Bell

This article is a preprint article and has not been peer-reviewed. It is under consideration following submission to UCL Open: Environment for open peer review.