Localizing Climate Change: Nordic Homeowners’ Interpretations of Visual Representations for Climate Adaptation

ABSTRACT

In recent years, effort has been put into developing various forms of climate visualization to create opportunities for people to explore and learn about local climate change risks and adaptation options. However, how target audiences make sense of such climate visualization has rarely been studied from a communication perspective. This paper analyses how Nordic homeowners made sense of a specific climate visualization tool, the VisAdapt™ tool. Involving 35 homeowners from three cities in 15 group test sessions, this study analyses the interpretive strategies participants applied to make sense of and assess the relevance of the visualized data. The study demonstrates that participants employed a set of interpretive strategies relating to personal experience and well-known places to make sense of the information presented, and that critical negotiation of content played an important role in how participants interpreted the content.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate visualization
• climate adaptation
• lay audiences
• visual communication
• meaning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was funded by the Nordic Centre of Excellence for Strategic Adaptation Research (NORD-STAR), which is funded by the Nordic Top-level Research Initiative sub-program “Effect studies and adaptation to climate change”. This paper also contributes to the research programme The Seed Box – a Mistra-Formas environmental humanities collaboratory.