Notions of Climate-Change-Related Uncertainty Among Stakeholders in the Coastal Region of Krummhörn, East Frisia, Germany

Climate change impacts and adaptation measures are subject to various uncertainties. In communication and decision-making, these uncertainties need to be adequately considered. However, uncertainty is a conceptually multifaceted issue, a plethora of connotations and meanings surround the term, and most of that is not explicit but only implicit. We examined the notions of climate-change-related uncertainties actually held by stakeholders – from government and administration, water management, agriculture, tourism, nature conservation, education, and the insurance industry – in the coastal region of Krummhörn, East Frisia, Germany. We employed qualitative, semi-structured in-depth interviews, covering general as well as context-specific aspects of uncertainty. To analyze the interviews, we employed qualitative content analysis, using MAXQDA software and deductively and inductively formed codes. One main finding was the large heterogeneity in the responses: different stakeholders hold widely differing notions of uncertainty – across and even within sectors. Most stakeholders do not normally employ one of the established scientific concepts of uncertainty, but hold a normative perspective on uncertainty which is strongly based on subjective valuation. When dealing with objective information on the quantification of uncertainty, such as probabilities, most stakeholders are inconsistent. The particular perspective on uncertainty is strongly related to the specific topic. On a meta-level, we found that all stakeholders were unfamiliar with talking about uncertainty and had difficulties expressing their ideas in language. Overall, our study confirmed that uncertainty is a contested, pluralistic, and complex phenomenon, which is looked at from different perspectives by different stakeholders. We conclude that the communication of uncertainty at the science–society interface requires particular attention, as the notions of uncertainty held by stakeholders are not always in line with the established scientific concepts of uncertainty.