Understanding scientists’ communication challenges at the intersection of climate and agriculture

A few scientists also mentioned challenges surrounding how scientists can reach producers (e.g., pathway of information, pipeline to the right people, access to stakeholders). “A challenge is the ability to tell them what is the impact on them and their future family members by climate change that is and will happen in the future. Make it personal and not global. Also, talk about the changes that they have already made in relation to changing climate.” “. . .I see the fundamental challenge is the limited number of opportunities for scientists and stakeholders to interact and share information. . .” Discussion Identifying strategies and challenges in scientists’ communication to agriculture stakeholder groups can aid in successful future communication [61]. Our respondents indicated experi- ence working in a climate-related field with a diversity of agricultural stakeholders. We did not investigate how frequently they interacted with stakeholders, and how that would affect their responses. This would be important to investigate in further studies. We did find that scientists are working with agricultural stakeholders whether they were trained to or not. The respondents also indicated scientists should be trained to effectively communicate scientific findings to nonscientists. This is consistent with other studies that sug- gest scientists should participate in communication training [34–36]. However, the belief (90.7%) and the practice (35.1%) are not congruent. Furthermore, training accessibility did

not emerge as a challenge in the open response questions by stakeholder groups. This may indicate they do not find a lack of training, or accessibility to the training, as a challenge to communicating with the specific stakeholder or perhaps they do not believe the training is applicable to the stakeholder. Further research could investigate why training participation is not higher if it is valued. Are the barriers external (cost, not specific/applicable to stakeholder) to the participant or internal (time management/priority investment)? A limitation of the sur- vey questionnaire is that respondents were not asked if they believed their communication strategies were successful. Despite the lack of training, does their experience supersede the value of training? Or perhaps, they believe that “other” scientists are in need of the training. A potential limitation of our survey is that respondents may be more invested in stakeholder engagement than non-respondents and our results to do not represent the breadth of scientist degree of communication and success of engagement. Despite scientists having a different perspective than producers and crop advisors on almost all climate statements, they were able to estimate these stakeholders’ perspectives (Fig 1). We found scientists were able to predict most of the producers and all of the crop advisors’ level of agreement with the climate statements. Where there was a difference, it was not substantial. Note, that the surveyed scientists were a national audience and the producer and crop advisors

were from 12 Midwestern states; however, our results are indicative scientists successfully understand their audiences’ perspective on climate and suggests this is not hindering commu- nication between these groups. Additionally, the scientists’ perspective of other stakeholder groups such as agribusinesses or other geographical regions, should be explored to determine if a similar knowledge base exists. Additionally, due to the exploratory nature of this study, the statements were written as concise as possible to avoid participant survey fatigue. Future stud- ies could parse out these climate change statements in greater detail to further explore the nuance in climate change perspectives and acceptance. PLOS ONE Understanding scientists’ communication challenges at the intersection of climate and agriculture PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0269927 August 2, 2022 13 / 22