May 13, 2026 @ 16:00 – 17:30 CET
We were delighted to have Patricia Nying’uro at our seminar. Nying’uro is a climate scientist working at the Kenya Meteorological Department, and affiliated with the University of Nairobi and the Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Bern. She is furthermore the IPCC focal point for Kenya. Her work focuses on climate change impacts on the local scale and the translation of climate science into actionable information. This research perspective is central to the paper project Nying’uro has co-authored “Using co-production to improve the appropriate use of sub-seasonal forecasts in Africa” (Hirson et al., 2021), that we have discussed during the seminar.
The aim of the project is to improve forecasting techniques that could support real-world decision making. More specifically, the research project co-developed sub-seasonal forecasts with climate scientists, meteorologists and users of forecast information to improve its application. The central questions of the project were what makes climate change information actionable and how to tailor information to specific needs? Working with information users, initiating knowledge co-production or making scientific knowledge usable raises important philosophical and practical questions regarding trust, knowledge pluralism, science communication and equity.
In the production of usable climate information, there are sometimes different criteria on what makes a forecast usable depending on the epistemic community. Scientists usually produce statistically precise visualisations, with indicated uncertainties and probabilities while decision makers value accessible and simple visualisations. Thus, how to reconcile these different standards and where are trade-offs to be made? Nying’uro was very clear in prioritising the needs of the users and the role of researchers to improve the usability of the forecasts. This practice can conflict with how the role of forecasters and meteorologists were traditionally understood as linear, where they generate information and transmit it to the users, without care for how it is used. Knowledge co-production aims to dismantle that by focussing on relations, iteration or feedback loops, active listening, considering recipients as active participants, focusing on real-world application and usability. In other words, the users shape the forecasts.
Knowledge co-production demands relations of trust. In this project, there was already a high baseline of trust. The Met office has built trustworthy relationships with local communities over time, working closely with the community leaders or champions, and with humanitarian actors like the Red Cross who play an important role in the community.
Providing usable knowledge is not a standard assumption in scientific research. This is however part of broader movements in academia on action-oriented and transdisciplinary research, which is also being discussed in philosophy (see session with David Ludwig), and “demands a new and potentially uncomfortable approach to knowledge creation” (Hirson et al., 2021, p. 3). We explored in our discussion what this might look like. This could, for instance, imply that information is a public good, so researchers owe it to the public to be relevant and practical. In addition, that information contributes to long-term resilience when it directly influences lives and livelihoods. In knowledge co-production practices, it could be the responsibility of the researcher to follow the process all the way through. This latter point touches upon a difficulty within co-production practices, namely, where does co-production start and end? Ideally, co-production should be never ending. However, given the temporary funding of research projects, sustainability of co-production is not guaranteed. There are institutional limitations in building sustainable projects that aim for resilience of and trustworthy relationships with the community. The risks of ending co-production processes at an early stage, due to limited funding, are the undermining of trust, extractivism of local knowledge and research fatigue. Researchers try to work around this though by writing overlapping projects. But maybe we need institutional transformation that prioritizes sustainability and well-being over scientific progress.