Meaghan Daly, Ph.D., assistant professor in the Department of Environmental Studies, recently presented at the European Climate Change Adaptation Conference in Lisbon, Portugal.
The conference brought together nearly 1,000 researchers, policymakers and practitioners from more than 50 countries.
Attendees discussed challenges, shared learning and explored future opportunities to support societal adaptation to climate change.
A key theme of the conference focused on the co-production of knowledge for climate change adaptation.
Co-production, the collaborative processes of producing knowledge between producers and users, can help ensure that scientific knowledge is effectively considered in policy decisions.
While it is recognized that there is a great deal of knowledge that could potentially lead to climate adaptation, using such information in practice remains a challenge.
Daly presented research papers in two sessions examining the challenges of co-producing knowledge to effectively inform climate adaptation decision-making.
In the first session, Daly discussed the crucial role of power dynamics between participants to shape the success of collaborative knowledge production among climate scientists, policy-makers and citizens in Tanzania.
In the second session, she presented findings on current constraints to user engagement within the production of seasonal climate forecasts in South Asia, Southern Africa and the Mediterranean region.
Daly is co-author of the 2018 Report of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change. The Lancet Countdown is an independent global monitoring system dedicated to tracking the connections between public health and climate change.
