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 the incorporation of social and behavioural factors, local needs, knowledge, and the customs of end users. I-CISK develops a next generation of end-user CS, which follows 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 seven Living Labs established in climate hotspots in Europe, its neighbours, 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-production 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 behaviour 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-CISC 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 combine end user’s local knowledge with scientific knowledge, contribute to improved decisions and policies, and a flourishing market for end-user CS.

52°North currently leads the analysis of the stakeholders’ requirements regarding the new climate-service platform jointly with GECOsistema. In 2022, 52°North initiated and conducted one-to-one meetings with representatives from each Living Lab to collect the stakeholders’ individual expectations and needs.

Our team also started discussions and developments regarding assessing, managing, and presenting the uncertainties that are an inherent component of climate models. 52°North has explored and prepared the first data sets covering different Living Labs for integration into the joint I-CISK Climate Service platform. Our software research engineers have prototyped different visualization techniques in order to provide a basis for further discussions on how the information derived from the Climate Services should be presented to the Living Labs stakeholders. During the next steps, 52°North will co-design a first prototype of the Climate Service platform and develop front-end components to combine the CS of the different end users.

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