Co-Design to Reveal the Value of Climate Services

Innovating climate services by integrating scientific and local knowledge

Climate Services (CS) are crucial in 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-producing 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 7 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. 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-production framework is unique as it (i) links climate impact and adaptation at different temporal scales from (sub)-seasonal forecasts through to climate scale projections, and (ii) explicitly considers the human climate feedbacks of adaptation 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-production framework, supported by online open courses, guidelines, business stories and strategic dissemination, will catalyze the production and adoption of CS that integrate end-user local knowledge with scientific knowledge, contribute to improved decisions and policies, and a flourishing market for end-user CS.

With its recent start in November 2021, the project kicked off the first phase of requirement analysis. 52°North leads this phase and the specification of the climate service platform jointly with GECO. The focus of 52°North tasks lies in the development of front-end components to combine new CS for end-users. Hence, 52°North will be involved in the co-design process driven from the Living Labs. Our team will also contribute to the discussions and developments to assess, manage and present the uncertainties that are an inherent component of climate models.

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