Evaluating the Impact of Case Studies in Climate Adaptation Decision Support
As climate impacts accelerate, practitioners need ways to learn from others who are already putting adaptation into practice. Case studies are often used to demonstrate how communities and organizations have approached similar challenges and what they learned along the way. However, much less attention has been paid to whether those case studies are actually useful for decision-making, and what makes some more useful than others.
This project examines how climate adaptation case studies are produced and used in practice. Working with the Water Utility Climate Alliance (WUCA) and adaptation practitioners, Aspen Global Change Institute (AGCI) Engaged Research team is bringing together practitioner experience and social science research to understand when case studies are useful, where they fall short, and how they can better support adaptation decisions. The broader goal is to improve how practical experience is captured and shared so communities can more easily learn from one another.
The project uses a mixed-methods social science approach. The first phase included group interviews with practitioners from across the United States, and the second phase consisted of a survey that builds on the interview findings and includes participants from around the world. Both phases explore how people use case studies, what they find useful or frustrating about them, and how case studies are developed in practice.
Project Goals
- Understand how practitioners use climate adaptation case studies and where they find them.
- Identify what makes a case study useful for decision-making.
- Examine how the process of developing a case study affects its usefulness.
- Apply these findings to improve how adaptation experiences are documented and shared.
What We Are Learning
Findings from the group interviews show that practitioners value case studies that are easy to find, concise, and directly relevant to the work they are trying to do. They also want case studies to explain what actually happened during implementation, including the problems that came up and how they were addressed. Participants also emphasized the importance of context. A case study is more useful when readers can judge whether the example fits their situation, rather than being presented as a model to copy elsewhere.
The research also suggests that written case studies work best as part of a larger learning process. Practitioners described opportunities to talk with peers, ask questions, and get technical support as important complements to written examples. Comparing several cases that address a similar problem may also be more useful than relying on a single example.
Project Team
Partners
The Water Utility Climate Alliance has been a key partner in the project. WUCA provided practitioner expertise and examples of how adaptation case studies are developed and used. WUCA members also helped shape the group interview protocol, interpret the findings, and develop the follow-up survey.
Funding
The initial phase of this research was supported by NOAA Adaptation Sciences (AdSci) program through Award NA24OARX431C0034-T1-01. The project began in September 2024 as a two-year effort, but the award was unexpectedly terminated in December 2025 before the planned research was complete. AGCI has continued work to complete the international survey and build on the findings from the NOAA-funded portion of the project.