A triple-loop survey to delve into physical climate storylines and
address climate risk assessment: Learning from farmers’ perception and
behaviour in northern Italy
Abstract
Climate change is both a physical and social phenomenon in which
individual understandings are contextualized within broader
considerations: individuals are not ‘blank slates’ receiving information
about climate change, but that information is always and inevitably
filtered through values and worldviews. Personal experience, local
knowledge, and social-learning influence climate risk perception and
vary substantially among countries and regions. Likewise, they
differently affect individuals and social groups at the regional and
local scale, among whom exposures, attitudes, and capacities to manage
risks vary greatly. A climate storyline approach is hence well-suited to
study human observations, compound climate risks, and inform and
conceptualize human–water systems interactions. Narrative storylines
are used as input drivers to climate models, to represent different
development pathways, which are usually characterized and applied at
national and sub-national scales. Storylines aim to provide new social
scenarios that address local human cognition uncertainties and improve
human behavior modelling and robustness when addressing decision-making
processes. Climate risks and hazards understanding can be communicated
by presenting the experiences or a sequence of events, facts, and
observations that are plausible and potentially critical for the system
under study. Methods guiding storytelling are usually focused on
conducting interviews with stakeholders, carrying out collective
workshops, developing appropriate focal questions, and iterating between
model results and key stakeholders. Therefore, can other data collection
tools be used to reduce uncertainty in physical aspects of climate
change from individuals’ local experience and perception? This
contribution presents a triple-loop survey to detail the core elements
of farmers’ perception and behavior when addressing climate change risk.
We collect first-hand observations from northern Italian farmers about
how climate change affects their activity and how extreme events are
conditioning their adaptation capacity. Emphasis is placed on
understanding the driving factors (risk awareness, perceived impacts,
and adaptation measures and barriers) involved in the physically
self-consistent past events and the plausibility of those factors.
Moreover, we want to test if these factors can provide relevant
implications for appropriately modelling storylines in decision-making
processes. Tentative results can be useful to discuss the methodological
framework of storylines building and narratives modelling, and at which
point surveys can be an alternative and complementary way of dealing
with deep uncertainty within climate risk management and social
scenarios modelling.