Isabella Amado, Juan Camilo Escobar and Natalia Rincón

Text 1

The recent OECD seminar on approaches to control climate change was fascinating. Not
only because of the interesting and novel insights from different group members but the
challenging and enlightening interventions from discussants and participants really
questioned some of the core concepts and assumptions upon which adaptation research
and policy are based.

Value-based decision making

Since the beginning, it was recognized that more climate science is not enough on its own to
reduce climate risk. We are going beyond the realm of science and now we are making
value-based decisions seeking to reduce the negative consequences of climate change. In
recent and very important political and economic discussions, the issue of values has been
frequently dealt with, as well as valuing nature as a form of wealth. The pursuit and decision-
making based on values is a great change in the public policy debate, however it has to
apply to the science on which we base our political decisions.

Although we would like our models to be free of values and only give objective information,
this cannot be done. Since, the models are created by people with different assumptions,
interpretations, and values. For example, the confidence used by the IPCC to describe the
level of uncertainty in climate science focuses on reliability over informativeness. This choice
has important ethical interventions, especially in the context of loss and damage. And
analyzing the statements of climate science and the different results of the models as if they
were neutral leaves these values implicit and hidden. With the article The Conversation, you
can see an example of how this can lead to ethical problems about how climate economic
models based on a particular set of assumptions and values have created the Net Zero
"trap".

It was emphasized that the need to move to value-based judgements is an explicit rather
than implicit approach, during the workshop. One way to use storylines of climate risk that
are explicitly formulated to represent multiple, plausible future climates. This approach asks
what the effect of interventions across a range of plausible futures would be. And it does not
ask how likely a particular future is.
Source:
- Plumpton, H. (2021). Seeing the value in climate science. Environment Focus.
Retrieved 2 August 2021, from
https://oecdenvironmentfocusblog.wordpress.com/2021/06/14/seeing-the-value-in-
climate-science/.