Evolving Climate Services into Knowledge–Action Systems

Abstract

The current landscape of climate services represents a highly diverse and still growing range of programs, projects, and portals involved in developing and/or providing climate services at different administrative levels and spatial-temporal scales. The diversity of service producers, users, and policy arenas has created a highly heterogeneous data-and information-oriented service landscape, and the authors contend that the domain of climate services requires efforts toward agreed structures and forms of conceptualization, operationalization, and evaluation. It is proposed here that qualitative classification be applied into climate change adaptation products, services, and systems to better guide research, policy, and practice with a clear terminology and analysis framework. This differentiation allows the pinpointing of critical challenges associated with the production and application of climate-relevant information, as well as the identification of suitable metrics to assess the impact of climate services. The article concludes with recommendations to advance climate services into knowledge-action systems and increase their sustainability.

Designing a Climate Service for Planning Climate Actions in Vulnerable Countries

“…At the same time, and within the content of the GCF proposals, methods and tools are urgently requested for capacity development to strengthen the national and sub-national organisations in their project motivation and proposal writing procedures. The requested tools can be categorised as climate services tailored for proposal writing to the GCF, which is in line with recent suggestions of how to evolve climate services into knowledge-action systems [11,15].…”

“…Scientific studies have highlighted many barriers between producers and users of climate information [9,10]. A recent review by [11] concluded that to become more efficient, the domain of climate services needs to address two key matters. Firstly, the modes of production and use of context-relevant climate information needs to be adjusted to effectively transfer climate science and information to national and local communities (e.g., [12,13]).…”

Toward a U.K. Climate Service Code of Ethics

“…This is due to a number of factors including the heterogeneity of definitions of what constitute climate services, the range of approaches required to develop adequate services, the influence of funding bodies in shaping the development of this field, quality and standards of the products and information produced, and a lack of evaluation activities to understand what works, where, how and to whom? (Vaughan et al 2018;Bruno Soares andBuontempo, 2019, Weichselgartner andArheimer 2019). The complexity of these issues is exacerbated by the rise of the privatization and commercialization of climate services (Webber and Donner, 2017), their perception among end users, and how services are governed, accessed, and used (Haigh et al 2018;Bruno Soares and Buontempo, 2019).…”

Co-production of Climate Services : A diversity of approaches and good practice from the ERA4CS projects (2017–2021)

“…Acknowledging usability gaps of climate information (McNie, 2013;Zulkafli et al, 2017), climate science scholars increasingly adopt collaborative (with society) research as a promising approach to engage with (potential) users of climate information (Vincent et al, 2020). Weichselgartner & Arheimer (2019) propose that for climate services sor adaptation, such transformative changes are required due to the ongoing emphasis on data and information, as opposed to the need for climate change knowledge which can be used for better decisionmaking (McNie, 2013). By focusing on knowledge production, it is more likely to deliver on its potential to support climate (change) related decision making.…”