10.04.2025New Publication

Abstract
Climate change is an ongoing threat to the environment and its mitigation poses significant challenges for society. Policymakers are tasked to rapidly make time-critical decisions including hazard forecasting, preparedness, warning, and response to mitigate potentially harmful consequences of climate change. This often involves map-based decision-making with visualized climate data, which are confronted with various sources of uncertainty. Uncertainty is an inherently difficult concept and thus challenging to communicate clearly to decision-makers and the public. Especially in the emotionally charged context of climate change, with segments of the population already showing skepticism towards climate change, the communication of uncertainty information in map displays still needs deeper investigation.

Applying a mixed factorial (3x2x2) map-based, online experiment, we aimed to study the visualization of (un)certainty in static climate change forecast maps, and how this might interact with map readers’ emotions and climate change attitudes. Inspired by the CH2018 Scenarios for the year 2060 (NCCS, 2018), we designed change prediction map stimuli with different climate variables, in three versions: without any uncertainty information, with uncertainty visualized as black dots (Figure 1) or lines (within factor: uncertainty), using empirically validated depiction guidelines (Retchless & Brewer, 2016). Based on prior research, we chose the term ‘certainty’ instead of ‘uncertainty’ in our stimuli (Johannsen et al., 2018). Each map was accompanied with context information on its right-hand side. It either included a graphic character with a fitting narrative (between factor: emotion), intended to elicit an emotional response (Fig. 1a) or it just contained information equivalent facts (Fig. 1b).

https://doi.org/10.5194/ica-abs-9-37-2025