The research, led by Laura Boyall of Royal Holloway University of London and Bangor University, together with Alice Milner, Klaus Dodds, and Celia Martin-Puertas, took an unusually direct approach: they interviewed the people on both sides of the divide. Six policy advisors from UK Civil Service departments — including the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero, Defra, the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, and the Environment Agency — and five senior palaeoclimate scientists from UK universities were questioned in semi-structured interviews about how they perceive, produce, and use evidence about past climates. The transcripts were then analysed using reflexive thematic analysis, with codes developed inductively from the data and grouped into three overarching themes: evidence, context for climate change, and temporal resolution.

The most striking finding concerns where decision makers actually get their climate information. The interviews revealed what the authors describe as an evidence hierarchy, and at its very top sit the assessment reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Every single decision maker interviewed named the IPCC as their preferred first source, citing its role as a single, trusted synthesis of thousands of peer-reviewed studies, its rigorous review process, and — for those working on international policy — its global acceptance. Below the IPCC came boundary organisations and knowledge brokers such as the Met Office, the World Meteorological Organisation, World Weather Attribution, and the Climate Change Committee, followed by commissioned research, government websites, and only then peer-reviewed journal articles. Expert advice and seminars sat at the very bottom of the hierarchy, used rarely despite being valued when they occur.

That lowly position for journal articles is significant, because it is precisely where most palaeoclimate evidence lives. The study explains that academic papers are written by scientists for scientists, dense with methodological detail, specialist terminology, and field-specific background that makes them slow to digest for officials working under tight deadlines. Single studies also need to be interpreted alongside a wider body of literature to be meaningful, making them less directly useful than syntheses. And there is a more mundane obstacle: many relevant papers sit behind paywalls that policy departments cannot afford to breach, pushing officials toward freely accessible alternatives. In other words, the default dissemination format of palaeoclimate research is almost perfectly misaligned with how its potential users actually consume evidence.

On the substance, there was genuine agreement between the two groups. Both scientists and decision makers agreed that palaeoclimate has a real role to play, above all in contextualising current and future warming. Records of past climates show how the climate system behaves over centuries and millennia, revealing the full range of natural variability and the frequency of rare but high-impact events that the short instrumental record simply cannot capture. Without that longer baseline, the study notes, policymakers risk systematically under- or over-estimating the likelihood of extremes, misidentifying the drivers of climate variability, and failing to anticipate thresholds or abrupt transitions. Palaeoclimate scientists interviewed for the study described contributing summaries of ecosystem tipping points and reconstructions of past water availability directly to the Foreign Office, and one remarked that everything we know about the climate system is ultimately based on understanding the past.

Yet the interviews also exposed a stubborn practical problem: time. Policy operates on electoral cycles and planning horizons of a few years to a few decades, while many palaeoclimate reconstructions resolve change only on centennial to millennial scales. One decision maker described hitting a wall of insufficient granularity, unable to extract from a coarse reconstruction any information useful for, say, mapping flood risk from a rapid-onset rainfall event. Another noted bluntly that if a graph of past climate looks like a straight line at 100-year resolution, a policymaker has little they can act on. Interestingly, the study suggests the problem is partly one of perception rather than fact: not all decision makers were aware that palaeoclimate reconstructions can achieve decadal or even annual resolution. The mismatch, the authors argue, reflects a failure to communicate why longer timescales matter, not an inherent irrelevance of the data.

Communication emerged as the principal barrier across all three themes — both the format in which palaeoclimate is disseminated and the messaging about its relevance. The study situates this within a well-documented critique of the so-called deficit model, the assumption among many scientists that publishing a paper initiates a linear flow of knowledge into policy. In reality, evidence use is indirect and shaped by institutional cultures, trust, timing, and political priorities. One decision maker even noted a preference for publicly funded research, treating public funding as a safeguard against perceived bias. The academic reward structure compounds the problem: under the UK’s Research Excellence Framework, traditional publications carry a 60 percent weighting in institutional assessments while impact beyond academia counts for just 25 percent, giving researchers little institutional incentive to engage with policy at all.

The authors do not leave the problem hanging. They distil a set of actionable recommendations aimed squarely at palaeoclimate scientists. First, write policy briefs: short, jargon-free summaries of the policy-relevant parts of a study, which surveys in other disciplines have found to be among the most effective tools for crossing the science-policy interface. Second, pursue transdisciplinary collaboration, embedding palaeoclimate evidence within research that already incorporates the socioeconomic and political dimensions that shape real decisions. Third, seek science-policy training, ideally through secondments and placement schemes such as those listed by the UK Government Office for Science, which build networks and first-hand understanding of how evidence is actually used. Fourth, and most importantly, embrace co-production — working with decision makers and boundary organisations such as the Met Office from the very start of a research project, so that the questions asked, the resolutions targeted, and the outputs produced are aligned with genuine policy needs from day one.

There are encouraging signs that the tide may be turning. Within the IPCC’s most recent assessment report, palaeoclimate content was deliberately distributed throughout the document rather than confined to standalone chapters, meaning that officials absorbing the report encounter long-term climate context naturally, without needing to seek it out. The study also points to the influence of individuals: decision makers with a palaeoclimate background could far more readily identify where such evidence would be useful, and past Chief Scientific Advisers — including Defra’s former CSA Gideon Henderson, an Earth-system scientist — have brought exactly that training into government. The authors acknowledge their study’s limitations, including a small sample of eleven interviews and a UK-specific focus, and they call for similar work across other national and supranational policy environments and a broader range of stakeholder groups. But the core message is clear and urgent: the past holds evidence the future desperately needs, and the barrier is not the science — it is the conversation around it. Fix that, the researchers argue, and palaeoclimate could finally take its place alongside instruments and models in the evidence base on which climate policy is built.

Subject of Research: Barriers and facilitators to integrating palaeoclimate evidence into UK climate policy decision making

Article Title: Barriers and facilitators for using palaeoclimate evidence in UK climate decision making

Article References: Barriers and facilitators for using palaeoclimate evidence in UK climate decision making. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.5194/gc-9-275-2026

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.5194/gc-9-275-2026

Keywords: palaeoclimate, climate policy, science-policy interface, UK Civil Service, IPCC, evidence hierarchy, knowledge exchange, co-production, policy briefs, climate decision making, proxy records, Geoscience Communication

The stakes could hardly be higher. The Lake Victoria Basin spans five countries—Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, and Burundi—and supports more than 40 million people whose livelihoods depend on its fisheries, agricultural lands, and freshwater supplies. In the Kenyan portion of the basin, upstream deforestation and unsustainable agricultural practices have accelerated the movement of sediments and pollutants into the lake, degrading both terrestrial and aquatic productivity. The study focused on the Winam Gulf, also known as the Nyanza or Kavirondo Gulf, where the land-lake interface is compressed into a densely populated landscape of farms, informal settlements, and expanding urban areas. Here, the consequences of poor land stewardship arrive at the lake’s edge with remarkable speed.

What makes this research distinctive is its technical foundation. The workshops were anchored in geochemical evidence generated through prior surveys by the British Geological Survey and KMFRI, including sediment fingerprinting, nutrient profiling, and contaminant mapping of inflowing rivers and lake sections. Sediment fingerprinting, in essence, reads the chemical signature of soil particles to determine where they originated, allowing scientists to trace exactly which catchments are delivering the heaviest loads of eroded material into the lake. This technique proved directly actionable: evidence from the Kibos and Nyando river sub-catchments identified erosion hotspots that prompted local and county government officers to prioritize riparian buffer restoration in subsequent planning meetings. The same insights shaped a joint KMFRI–NEMA policy brief recommending integrated land-use controls and catchment monitoring as tools for lake protection.

The workshops themselves followed a deliberately structured format across four multi-stakeholder sessions. Day one set the context, with presentations on land-lake dynamics and climate change challenges. Day two moved into breakout discussions, participatory mapping, and the identification of intervention hotspots. Day three was reserved for reflection and the co-design of outreach and adaptation strategies. Twenty-nine participants took part, drawn from institutions including KMFRI, the Kenya Agricultural and Livestock Research Organization, the National Environment Management Authority, the State Department for Blue Economy and Fisheries, county governments of Kisumu, Siaya, Homa Bay, and Migori, the University of Eldoret, and community networks such as the Kenya National Beach Management Unit Network. The gender balance was nearly even, at 52 percent men and 48 percent women, with deliberate inclusion of youth and persons with disabilities.

Facilitation methods were adapted to ensure that technical knowledge did not become a barrier to participation. Workshops employed local languages, visual tools, and simplified geochemical infographics, alongside participatory techniques such as problem-tree analysis, SWOT analysis, visioning exercises, and landscape storytelling. The researchers were explicit about the power dynamics inherent in knowledge co-production, drawing on feminist political ecology and disability-inclusive research approaches to ensure that scientific insights and community experiences could inform one another on equal footing. This attention to inclusion was not decorative: feedback from women’s groups, youth, and persons with disabilities directly influenced the prioritization of resilience actions, particularly around community awareness, adaptive farming, and inclusive policy design.

The quantitative results from pre- and post-workshop assessments are striking. Among surveyed stakeholders, 87.5 percent reported that policy briefs enhanced their understanding of land-lake interactions, while 83.3 percent indicated that locally adapted communication tools fostered community trust. Policy briefs were credited with catalyzing community baraza discussions—a traditional forum for public deliberation—in 79.2 percent of cases, and 75 percent reported influencing future actions based on local feedback. On data harmonization, 87.5 percent of respondents said harmonized datasets facilitated knowledge exchange between researchers and communities, and 83.3 percent said such data helped align local strategies with scientific insights. These figures suggest that when scientific information is translated into accessible formats, it does not merely inform—it builds the social trust required for collective action.

The knowledge gap analysis revealed persistent deficiencies that the workshops began to address. Land-sector stakeholders overwhelmingly identified the simplification of complex research for policy influence as their dominant challenge, with 81.8 percent flagging this communication gap. Lake stakeholders, meanwhile, pointed to the disconnection between research institutions and county departments, cited by 60 percent, as a structural barrier to integrated policymaking. Low uptake of policy briefs without community buy-in was noted by 54.5 percent of land stakeholders, underscoring that even well-crafted documents fail when the people they affect are not involved in their creation. The study’s authors frame these findings through the lens of knowledge mobilization theory, in which policy briefs, infographics, and baraza dialogues act as boundary objects—artifacts that facilitate shared understanding across professional and cultural divides.

The participatory process also surfaced a rich vein of local insight. As one county fisheries officer observed, when technical findings are translated into local language and shared through barazas, people feel ownership and understand how their practices affect the lake. A community group leader echoed this, noting the need for more platforms where scientists and farmers meet regularly, not just during projects. These reflections reinforce a central conclusion of the study: passive dissemination through journal articles is insufficient for environmental governance. Instead, the researchers advocate a deliberate chain of translation—evidence, policy reform, extension delivery, community uptake—with geochemical data informing every step, from fertilizer recommendations matched to site-specific soil chemistry to wetland restoration and silt trap installations at the lake margin.

The institutional legacy of the workshops may prove as important as their immediate outputs. Participants agreed to form a multi-agency coordination committee for the Winam Gulf Basin and proposed a virtual data-sharing platform for research dissemination, anchored in collaboration between KMFRI, KALRO, the Kenya Forestry Research Institute, the Lake Basin Development Authority, academia, and county governments. The National Commission for Science, Technology and Innovation was identified as a key regulator for research quality and open data standards. Participants also called for dissemination strategies that extend beyond formal channels, including radio, SMS messaging, schools, and local influencers, to bridge the gap between researchers and grassroots communities.

The study’s authors are careful to temper expectations. They emphasize that participatory frameworks and geochemical intelligence are enabling structures rather than direct drivers of resilience, and that lasting outcomes depend on governance effectiveness, policy uptake, and equitable resource access—factors largely beyond any single project’s control. They also acknowledge limitations: social hierarchies of gender, economic status, and physical ability may have shaped whose voices were most audible, and future frameworks should incorporate gender-responsive facilitation and accessible formats such as audio briefs, illustrated infographics, and community theatre. Yet the evidence assembled in Kisumu offers a compelling blueprint for the world’s threatened lake basins. As climate change intensifies erosion, alters rainfall, and pushes ecosystems toward potentially irreversible regime shifts, the Lake Victoria experience demonstrates that the path from scientific diagnosis to ecological recovery runs through village squares and county planning offices as much as through laboratories. Resilience, this research suggests, is not something scientists deliver to communities—it is something they build together.

Subject of Research: Participatory knowledge mobilization and geochemical evidence for land-lake socio-ecological resilience in the Lake Victoria Basin

Article Title: Outreach and knowledge mobilization for the effective use of adoptive strategies for land-lake based resilience

Article References: Aura, C. M., Awandu, H., Ongore, C. O., Musa, S., Humphrey, O. S., Isaboke, J., Watts, M. J., Osano, O., & Blake, W. H. (2025). Outreach and knowledge mobilization for the effective use of adoptive strategies for land-lake based resilience. Discover Conservation, 2(1), Article 47. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44353-025-00067-7

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44353-025-00067-7

Keywords: Lake Victoria, land-lake resilience, geochemistry, sediment fingerprinting, knowledge mobilization, participatory workshops, Kenya, Winam Gulf, social-ecological systems, policy briefs, community engagement, climate adaptation