How to give expert advice in transformational times

I am a policy analyst. My job is to provide expert information to decision makers and the public to help improve public policy. This job, always hard, has become harder.

- Robert Lempert

People rally for climate justice ahead of the COP30 climate summit in Brazil on July 23.

(REUTERS)

Seven decades of global economic growth and relative peace have provided great wealth, liberation and enhanced well-being but have also overrun the Earth’s environmental boundaries, created vast inequalities and spawned disruptive new technologies. Transformational change, for good or bad, is now inevitable.

This creates a paradox for expert policy advice: We need experts more than ever. Unaided intuition will fail us as society leaps into the greater unknown. At the same time, transformational change makes communication among experts, decision makers and the public harder. Experts will be caught by surprise by novel shifts, just like everyone else, and consequential policy decisions will often pose questions they can’t easily answer.

Let me offer an illustrative example. About 15 years ago, I participated in a meeting of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The meeting I attended brought together scientific experts from many different countries and academic disciplines to grapple with the coming surge of more extreme weather events. The meeting’s location near Brisbane, Australia, was poignant. Just weeks before, the city had flooded. Several years of unprecedented extreme drought had suddenly given way to days of unprecedented extreme rain.