Co-Design to Reveal the Value of Climate Services
I-CISK will empower local communities to build and use tailored local Climate Services to adapt to climate change.
Climate Services (CS) are crucial to empowering citizens, stakeholders and decision-makers in defining resilient pathways to adapt to climate change and extreme events. Despite advances in scientific data and knowledge (e.g. Copernicus, GEOSS), current CS fail to achieve their full value proposition to end users. Challenges include incorporation of social and behavioral factors, local needs, knowledge and the customs of end users. I-CISK develops a next generation of end user CS, which follow a social and behaviorally informed approach to co-creating services that meet climate information needs at a relevant spatial and temporal scale. It takes a trans-disciplinary approach to developing CS by working with stakeholders in seven Living Labs established in climate hotspots in Europe, it’s neighbors, and Africa, to address climate change and extremes (droughts, floods and heatwaves) faced by agriculture, forestry, tourism, energy, health, and the humanitarian sectors. Together with end users, I-CISK will co-design, co-create, co-implement, and co-evaluate pre-operational CS that provide a step change in integrating local knowledge, perceptions and preferences with scientific knowledge. This co-creation framework is unique as it
- links climate impact and adaptation at different temporal scales from (sub)-seasonal forecasts to climate-scale projections, and
- explicitly considers the feedback between human behavior and climate, i.e., between adaptation strategies and options, in a multi-timescale, multi-sector, and multi-hazard setting.
The novel CS will be built on a highly customizable cloud-based web platform that I-CISK develops; freely available, and easily replicable. The I-CISK co-creation framework, supported by online open courses, guidelines, business stories and strategic dissemination, will catalyze the production and adoption of CS that combine end user’s local knowledge with scientific knowledge, contribute to improved decisions and policies, and a flourishing market for end user CS.
In 2024, 52°North designed the architecture of the CS web framework based on the stakeholder requirements collected during face-to-face meetings with representatives of each Living Lab in 2022 and 2023. This first version of the architecture will be adapted and refined over the course of the project. 52°North continued to define the stakeholder requirements for the visualization of the CS results using a co-design approach. Based on these findings, our team improved mock-ups and preoperational Climate Services for the Living Labs Rijnland (NL) and Guadalquivir (ES), which were deployed in an Open Telekom Cloud. The corresponding web applications access different data sources and allow the user to visualize CS indicators in an interactive way by selecting a preferred time period or weather station.
Together with our project partner GECOsistema we used OGC API Processes to integrate different data sources into our backend architecture. This aims at one of our deliverables for the project: An automated Climate Service Composer that allows people to easily create their own CS integrating their specific data resources.
In addition to these activities, 52°North is actively involved in shaping the co-design process between developers, climate modelers and stakeholders. Our team also participates in discussions and developments on how to assess, manage and present the uncertainties that are an inherent component of climate models.
Partners
Coordinator, IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, The Netherlands
European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), UK
Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), Sweden
VU Foundation, The Netherlands
CREAF, Spain
Uppsala University, Sweden
The Netherlands Red Cross, The Netherlands
GECOsistema, Italy
Caucasus Environmental NGO Network (CENN), Georgia
Universidad Computense de Madrid, Spain
IDEAS Science Ltd.], Hungary
EMVIS S.A., Greece