Effective stakeholder engagement is essential for advancing climate science and ensuring that research translates into solutions. By fostering collaboration and integrating multiple perspectives, stakeholder engagement strategies can enhance the relevance, credibility, and impact of climate science.  

The research theme “Stakeholder Engagement in Climate Science” supports stakeholder engagement processes in ECE to increase the relevance of climate science outputs for policy makers, businesses and civil society. Engagement strategies vary depending on the aim of a project and the stakeholders being engaged. A special focus lies on the co-development of scenarios that can be integrated into modelling exercises and the co-development of online tools to make scientific data more accessible. 

1.    Scenario co-development
Building on IIASA’s extensive expertise in modelling and the availability of in-house models, tools and data, scenario co-development processes not only develop scenario narratives collaboratively, but  translates these narratives into quantitative models. The aim of such co-development processes is to ensure that scenarios match the needs of stakeholders while providing an interesting research angle for scientists. An example is the currently on-going SPARCCLE project where three stress testing scenarios are developed in cooperation with stakeholders.

2.    Online tool co-development
Online tools are a great way to explore recent scientific findings, but their use is not automatically intuitive for a non-scientist. When developing new online tools or expanding existing ones, it is therefore important to engage key stakeholders in the design process to ensure the user-friendliness of such tools. Tool co-development activities are undertaken in close collaboration with the “Scenario Services and Scientific Software” team is essential. An example of a co-developed tool is the PROVIDE Climate Risk Dashboard. 

3.    Engagement with targeted audiences
Next to project-specific engagement, tailored products for specific stakeholder groups are prepared to provide science support for negotiations and input for climate litigation. While these groups  require very different input, they both have capacity building demand, and are an important group to gather feedback from when it comes to the access to scientific information or the design of future projects. IIASA maintains close relationships with these stakeholder groups and participate in network initiatives for better collaboration. 

4.    Stakeholder management
The stakeholder processes considered are exclusively in a scientific context, meaning mostly in science projects. The integration of stakeholder processes and targeted activities into the projects is weaved in right from the start. This includes the mapping of stakeholders, stakeholder communication, the setting up of advisory boards, the organisation of webinars and workshops and targeted communication to specific stakeholder communities. An example is the current SPARCCLE project or the RESCUE project. Collaboration with stakeholder activities also exists beyond the ECE program for example in the Forest Navigator project. 

5.    Collaboration with communications
Stakeholder engagement holds great opportunities for targeted science communication. Stakeholders can act as multipliers, reach out to their networks and consequently increase the visibility of scientific work. Stakeholder engagement activities also hold great potential for communication to other audiences. Through the Stakeholder Engagement theme, a close collaboration with the communications and external relations department is ensured as an essential part of their work to contribute to the impact of IIASA.
 

Resources

Successful stakeholder engagement processes can also lead to scientific publications, some of which are listed here: