Whose Ethics? Which Values? And Where Do We Find Them, Anyway, When Producing and Using Climate Science for Enhancing Water and Energy Security in the Developing World?"

Knowledge about climate change, like climate change itself, is spread unevenly around the world and is measured in different ways. This talk will open by describing some of the drivers and resulting consequences of that uneven spread, and discuss some of the ways that the knowledge and effects of climate change are measured and reported in assessments of projected future water and energy security. We will draw out from that base description one possible framework within which we can organize questions about the application of ethics and values in making decisions when projections are developed for future water demand and supply, and for changing allocations of both.

Projecting water and energy security under climate-changed futures is an interesting test for locating ethics and values owing to the uneven distribution of numerically intensive knowledge about creating climate projections, which often resides outside the developing world application domains. This frequent but not ubiquitous difference in location enhances the opportunity for comparing the relevant ethics and values used from the developed world with those from the developing world when projections are used from "outside". We are particularly interested to show where decisions taken by scientists in the developed world concerning the representation and use of uncertainty and the related idea of confidence in future projections may have restricted the utility of those projections for some climate change-affected domains in the developing world. As one example: how much confidence is enough, or even possible, when using numerical projections for projects around which limited numerical information on asset vulnerability or risk criticality is available now? The talk will close with descriptions of cases in which we appear to be overlooking opportunities to enhance climate resilience in the developing world because we may have applied developed-world notions of ethical science in decisions about domain projections without fully considering the ethics and values expressed by people living in those domains, and with candidate recommendations for how to capture those opportunities for future applications in the developing world.