Fostering Skills in Communicating Uncertainty in the Geosciences: a review of concepts, strategies and approaches applied in the training school “Understanding the Unknowns: Communicating Uncertainty as a Driving Force for Geosciences”

The recent COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need to effectively communicate forecasts and their uncertainty. This is especially important if the aim is to minimize the risk of misinformation and poorly-informed decision-making. Both the IPCC and the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction have identified risk communication, complexity and uncertainty as major challenges to decision-making, and call for better understanding of how existing risk communication practices are perceived by those affected and those making decisions.

Despite these calls, many geoscientists, especially early career researchers, lack opportunities to discuss scientific uncertainty and explore ways to communicate uncertainty to different audiences, including the non-scientific publics. To address this demand, we organize the international training school “Understanding the Unknowns: Communicating Uncertainty as a Driving Force for Geosciences”, which is co-sponsored by the EGU and set to take place at the University of Tübingen in Germany from March 17 to 19, 2025. This in-person, three-day training school aims to equip Early Career Researchers with knowledge and skills needed to effectively account for and communicate uncertainty in geosciences with their peers as well as public audiences.

Some of the biggest challenges of training programs on uncertainty relate to the interdisciplinary nature of the concept: understanding and effectively communicating uncertainties requires knowledge and skill sets typically taught and researched across a range of diverse fields. Highlighting this interdisciplinary background, we combine insights from geoscientific uncertainty assessment and outputs (e.g., maps, interpretations, models, simulations, time series) with approaches from (visual) rhetoric, science communication, presentation research, and multimedia competence. 

Building on existing good practice, the training strives to equip geoscientists with the tools and skills they need to communicate uncertainty, help reduce misinformation, and enhance future decision-making. This will be done collaboratively through an interdisciplinary partnership between the Department of Geosciences, the Research Center for Science Communication at the Department of General Rhetoric, and Global Awareness Education at the University of Tübingen. The new approaches and exercises developed for this training will not only be practically applied in the training school, but also reflected and evaluated, including a pre-workshop survey addressing expectations and needs identified by the participants and a concluding qualitative evaluation.

In this presentation, we will discuss our multifaceted practices and strategies applied to foster skills in communicating uncertainty in geosciences, present the results of the accompanying survey and evaluation used in this training, and conclude with lessons learned and best practices recommended to further develop similar opportunities in the future.