Challenges to the sustainability of climate services in Europe

Abstract

Climate services have emerged as a research and operational field in recent years. This development has been underpinned and supported by significant research, funding and agenda‐setting efforts such as the Global Framework for Climate Services internationally and the Roadmap for Climate Services and the Copernicus Climate Change Service in Europe. The fast pace at which this field is developing raises a number of key challenges that need to be critically examined and addressed to ensure the future development and sustainability of climate services in Europe. This opinion piece highlights a number of challenges currently threatening the viability of climate services including the complexity of the concept of climate services; the complex landscape of complementary research and development areas relevant to climate services; existing rights to freely access and use climate services; current limitations to funding structures and mechanisms and how that impacts on the development of climate services; the emphasis on co‐production as a precondition to climate services development; and the limited role of the social sciences in the research and operational field of climate services. Effectively addressing these challenges will require a commitment from the scientific and practitioner communities to engage in critical and reflective debates around the future conceptualization and operationalization of climate services in Europe. This paper aims to provide critical input to stimulate a necessary and overdue debate around the sustainability and future of climate services in Europe. This article is categorized under: Social Status of Climate Change Knowledge > Knowledge and Practice

Customising global climate science for national adaptation: A case study of climate projections in UNFCCC’s National Communications

“…For instance, the recent push towards co-produced climate services customised to a stakeholder’s need (cf. Vaughan and Dessai, 2014; Porter and Dessai, 2017; Bruno Soares and Buontempo, 2019; Skelton et al, 2019) is very difficult to achieve when countries rely on pre-configured climate modelling software. While in the near future the means of accessing climate science might well change, as modelling software such as MAGICC-SCENGEN is discontinued and climate information websites are evolving (Hewitson et al, 2017), customisation restrictions will likely continue.…”

Framing Climate Services: Logics, Actors, and Implications for Policies and Projects

“…For producers, who owns the data, following an open policy or not, and favoring a free or a selling model mean different things. The question of intellectual property rights in CIS, for example, has not yet been examined, but it can influence the accessibility of such services [120]. It also has implications for users, for obvious reasons.…”

“…Some issues finally question the perspectives of climate services, or what Bruno Soares and Buontempo call their "sustainability" [120].…”

Quality Assessment in Co-developing Climate Services in Norway and the Netherlands

“…Notwithstanding these challenges, scholars argue it is important to assess climate services quality in order to: (i) develop information that is fitted to institutions' functions and problems; (ii) demonstrate the particular outcomes, impacts, and added value for an institution; (iii) justify public and private investment; and (iv) distill lessons for climate services scholarship and practice, including lessons on evaluation itself (Tall et al, 2018;Bruno Soares and Buontempo, 2019;Vaughan et al, 2019b;Lemos et al, 2020). Reviews show that evaluation is becoming more commonplace in climate services initiatives but that there are varying levels of commitment and no commonly accepted approaches or frameworks, with a consequence that many evaluations adopt a narrow perspective on quality that assesses a subset of qualities (Vaughan et al, 2019a, b;Tall et al, 2018).…”