Climate change communication in the Netherlands

Together with Daan Boezeman and Martijn Vink, I was asked to reconstruct the history of climate change communication in the Netherlands for the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science. Going back to the 1950s and covering two "climate change waves", we used the theoretical perspectives of framing and agenda setting, science-policy-society interactions, and online communication in the network society, to guide our analysis. National and international policy developments are both the objects and drivers of communication processes over time.

The paper can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.455

Here's the abstract and the full reference:

Climate change communication in the Netherlands started in the 1950s, but it was not until the late 1970s that the issue earned a place on the public agenda, as an aspect of the energy problem, and in the shadow of controversy about nuclear energy. Driven largely by scientific reports and political initiatives, the first climate change wave can be observed in the period from 1987 to 1989, as part of a broader environmental consciousness wave. The Netherlands took an active role in international climate change initiatives at the time but struggled to achieve domestic emission reductions throughout the 1990s. The political turmoil in the early 2000s dominated Dutch public debate, until An Inconvenient Truth triggered the second climate change wave in 2006–2007, generating peak media attention and broad societal activity. The combination of COP15 and Climategate in late 2009 marked a turning point in Dutch climate change communication, with online communication and climate-sceptic voices gaining much more prominence. Climate change mitigation was pushed down on the societal and political agenda in the 2010s. Climate change adaptation had received much attention during the second climate change wave and had been firmly institutionalized with respect to flood defense and other water management issues. By 2015 a landmark climate change court case and the Paris Agreement at COP21 were fueling climate change communication once again.

Dewulf, A., Boezeman, D., & Vink, M. (2017). Climate Change Communication in the Netherlands. In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Climate Science (pp. 1–35). Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228620.013.455

Results from the Mountain-EVO project: two publications on the social and hydrological aspects of water

Two publications resulting from the Mountain-EVO project have become available. They both address the social and hydrological aspects of water governance.

The paper by Feng Mao and others addresses the implications of how social and hydrological systems are conceptualized when studying their resilience. The paper by Julian Clark and others develops a theoretical framework on hydrosocialities and applies it to two remote mountain communities in the Mustang region in Nepal.

Mao, F., Clark, J., Karpouzoglou, T., Dewulf, A., Buytaert, W., & Hannah, D. (2017). HESS Opinions: A conceptual framework for assessing socio-hydrological resilience under change. Hydrology and Earth System Sciences, 21(7), 3655–3670. https://doi.org/10.5194/hess-21-3655-2017

Clark, J., Gurung, P., Chapagain, P. S., Regmi, S., Bhusal, J. K., Karpouzoglou, T., … Dewulf, A. (2017). Water as Time-Substance: The Hydrosocialities of Climate Change in Nepal. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 4452(July), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2017.1329005

User-driven design of decision support systems for polycentric environmental resources management

Another result from the Mountain-EVO project has been published in Environmental Modelling and Software. The paper was led by Zed Zulkafli, former postdoc at Imperial College and now Lecturer at Universiti Putra Malaysia. The paper presents and a participatory framework for designing decision-support systems that builds on understanding the decision making processes and on iterative design of the user interface. The framework is illustrated with a Peruvian case study.

User-driven design of decision support systems for polycentric environmental resources management

Open and decentralized technologies such as the Internet provide increasing opportunities to create knowledge and deliver computer-based decision support for multiple types of users across scales. However, environmental decision support systems/tools (henceforth EDSS) are often strongly science-driven and assuming single types of decision makers, and hence poorly suited for more decentralized and polycentric decision making contexts. In such contexts, EDSS need to be tailored to meet diverse user requirements to ensure that it provides useful (relevant), usable (intuitive), and exchangeable (institutionally unobstructed) information for decision support for different types of actors. To address these issues, we present a participatory framework for designing EDSS that emphasizes a more complete understanding of the decision making structures and iterative design of the user interface. We illustrate the application of the framework through a case study within the context of water-stressed upstream/downstream communities in Lima, Peru.

Zulkafli, Z., Perez, K., Vitolo, C., Buytaert, W., Karpouzoglou, T., Dewulf, A., … Shaheed, S. (2017). User-driven design of decision support systems for polycentric environmental resources management. Environmental Modelling & Software, 88, 58–73. 

The is open access and can be downloaded from http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.envsoft.2016.10.012