Kieran Findlater, PhD

summary

I am an Adjunct Professor in the Institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability at the University of British Columbia (UBC). I lead interdisciplinary research projects evaluating individual, institutional and societal responses to complex sustainability problems using integrated quantitative and qualitative methods, and continuous stakeholder and policy engagement. I am currently working as a Senior Policy Advisor in the Impact and Innovation Unit of the Privy Council Office, Government of Canada, helping to develop a program of research on climate change to support departments across the Canadian federal government in their implementation of evidence-based and results-driven climate policies for both mitigation and adaptation.

I hold a Ph.D. from UBC, where I was recognized for my innovative work on climate-adaptive decision-making at the intersection of climate science, psychology, economics and sociology. I have more than 15 years of experience in policy-relevant research and analysis, having managed timelines, budgets and personnel, and having led extensive fieldwork in Canada, India and South Africa. My more recent work focuses on climate services, human judgment and decision-making, risk perceptions, and implications for gender, race and social justice. I have published 14 peer-reviewed articles evaluating and recommending solutions to diverse climate change mitigation and adaptation problems in the energy, water, forestry and agricultural sectors. My work informs evidence-based and forward-looking policy on adaptation to ensure that Canada thrives in a changing climate, limiting the harmful effects of climate change while taking full advantage of new opportunities for innovation and clean growth.

Please do not hesitate to reach out by email or social media to discuss any of my past or ongoing projects, to propose new work and new lines of inquiry or simply to chat. My current place of residence is Ottawa, Canada, but my outlook is global.

Featured Publications

A short list of featured publications. You may find a more complete list on the Publications tab. Please contact me if you wish to read one or more papers but cannot access the PDFs.

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Difficult climate-adaptive decisions in forests as complex social–ecological systems

PROCEEDINGS OF THE NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES (PNAS) (2022)

This paper argues that adapting is not enough – climate-adaptive decisions framed as technical choices erase our values, norms, ethics and fundamental goals. It add further evidence of the inherent risk in privileging natural science above other forms of knowledge at the science–policy interface.

Technological choices are inherently political, and normative and ethical considerations are made invisible by instrumental and technical approaches to decision-making. Adapting to climate change, in and of itself, is not a useful goal. It is not enough that climate adaptation be technically successful – climate-adaptive decisions should account for the breadth of values that forests create and the diverse voices of those who depend on them, and the health and integrity of the forest ecosystem on which all forest values depend.

Both climate change and adaptation will have widespread and cascading impacts on diverse nonclimate values in complex social-ecological systems like forests. Stakeholders thus have difficulty judging the acceptability of adaptation options and the trade-offs they imply. But because of their diverse sources and kinds of knowledge, stakeholders may collectively understand complex social–ecological systems better than scientists alone.

Publisher link: https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2108326119

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Redefining climate change maladaptation using a values-based approach in forests

PEOPLE AND NATURE (2022)

This paper asks what is lost when adaptation 'gone wrong' is framed in terms of climate outcomes alone. From the plain-language summary: "Climate change adaptation 'gone wrong' is about much more than climate --- A narrow understanding of maladaptation is harmful because it may overlook the more fundamental reasons that we adapt to climate change: to protect our food supplies, water sources, jobs, homes, wildlife and many other things we value that are threatened by rising heat, storms, wildfires and a range of other impacts…. Only by seeing the bigger picture can we avoid creating new problems as we seek to repair the damage caused by climate change."

Open source: https://doi.org/10.1002/pan3.10278

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Climate services promise better decisions but mainly focus on better data

NATURE CLIMATE CHANGE (2021)

This paper asks why climate services (for demand-driven climate information) so often produce nominal changes in climate science where transformations are promised. From the News and Views coverage by Meaghan Daly: "Climate services have long sought to bridge the gap between climate science and improved societal decision-making. Now, a study finds that fulfilling that promise will require rethinking the norms, institutions and governance of science itself."

Publisher link: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-021-01125-3

Free read-only version: https://rdcu.be/cvVtA

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Farmers’ risk‐based decision making under pervasive uncertainty: Cognitive thresholds and hazy hedging

RISK ANALYSIS (2019)

This paper revisits farmer decision making using an in-depth, in-situ mental models approach with a focus on climate change and conservation agriculture. We assess how large‐scale commercial grain farmers in South Africa (n = 90) coordinate decisions about weather, climate variability, and climate change with those around other environmental, agronomic, economic, political, and personal risks that they manage every day. Contrary to all-too-common simplifying assumptions, we show that these farmers tend to satisfice rather than optimize as they face intractable and multifaceted uncertainty; they make imperfect use of limited information; they are differently averse to different risks; they make decisions on multiple time horizons; they are cautious in responding to changing conditions; and their diverse risk perceptions contribute to important differences in individual behaviors. In an increasingly risky, uncertain and complex world, they use two important strategies to make practical decisions: cognitive thresholds and hazy hedging. These strategies, evident in farmers' simultaneous use of conservation agriculture and livestock to manage weather risks, are the messy in situ performance of naturalistic decision‐making techniques. These results may inform continued research on such behavioral tendencies in narrower lab‐ and modeling‐based studies.

Publisher link: https://doi.org/10.1111/risa.13290

Free read-only version: https://rdcu.be/bprHv

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Six languages for a risky climate: How farmers react to weather and climate change

CLIMATIC CHANGE (2018)

This analysis tests the relationship between the cognitive orientations and climate-adaptive practices of commercial grain farmers in South Africa. It uses an innovative, multi-layered, interdisciplinary method to generate important insights into the in situ practice of climate-adaptive decision making. I show that farmers use six exhaustive and mutually exclusive linguistic framings (agricultural, cognitive, economic, emotional, political and survival) in describing weather and climate risks. The prevalence of these framings (especially ‘emotional’ and ‘survival’) strongly predicts their adoption of conservation agriculture, a climate-resilient set of best practices. But these framings and their practical effects are difficult to discern using common research methods. Survival framing, for instance, is a consequential mindset rather than a financial state, and would therefore go undetected in conventional studies that rely on direct survey or interview questions.

Publisher link: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10584-018-2217-z

Free read-only version: https://rdcu.be/N9V3

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Integration anxiety: The cognitive isolation of climate change

GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHANGE (2018)

In this analysis, I examine the relationship between weather and climate risk management by commercial grain farmers in South Africa. The results yield important insights into the challenges that farmers must overcome in ‘mainstreaming’ climate change adaptation so that climate risks can be managed efficiently and effectively in coordination with other objectives. In particular, I find that these farmers isolate climate change from their mental models of weather and other ‘normal’ risks, which will make it difficult to manage climate risks rationally, or to integrate climate-adaptive responses with other decisions. The paper further reinforces the need to pay attention to the messy ways in which farmers actually make decisions. Following publication, this paper was featured by Nature Climate Change in their Research Highlights as one of four notable contributions to the climate change literature in May 2018, and the only social science paper covered that month.

Publisher link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2018.02.010

Keywords

decision making
risk perceptions
risk communication
climate change
adaptation
mitigation
resilience

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