The Future of the Climate is Now?!
How the DIRECTED and I-CISK projects support user-centered climate solutions in our ever-changing world
Author: Julia Kraatz (52°North)
Have you ever found yourself reading about climate change and wondered to what extent you or someone you know might be impacted? How your community might be impacted? And then, how you could find out this information?
As global emissions rise and the state of our climate becomes increasingly uncertain, questions like these are common, and you would not be alone in asking them. That’s why projects like I-CISK[1] aim to create open-source, interoperable, scalable, and user-friendly platforms to provide information on the risk of severe weather events and the effects of climate change to users, just like you.
The following use case showcases how climate information can be accessible, and informative, within the respective project’s labs.
The Rijnland Living Lab
The I-CISK project focuses on services that are related to the consequences of climate change, such as severe drought periods.The active exchange and co-development with stakeholders in seven so-called Living Labs (LLs) aims to create products that are truly tailored to the stakeholders needs. One of these LLs is the area of Rijnland in the Netherlands, which is popular for recreational boating and relies heavily on the touristic sector. Seasonal forecasts on potential drought situations are of great importance for stakeholders in this area as low water levels can heavily influence the accessibility of certain waterways.
Have you ever searched for tools to do long-term predictions for estimating the effects of climate change? They are usually quite inaccessible, aren’t they? Often they are made such that experts from science can tune the models precisely to their needs, but as a person with average knowledge and skill using them involves a lot of overhead. In the case of the web application for the Rijnland area, the focus was set on providing services that use sophisticated scientific methods to process the results of climate modelling, but present them in a way that they are easy to understand and navigate. Various discussion sessions with stakeholder representatives resulted in sketches of possible layouts which software developers then turned into app functionalities – climate services.
Figure 1. Overview of the Rijnland LL application on the severity of the drought situation for the upcoming weeks in the context of recreational boating.
As a result of this co-design approach, the Rijnland LL application uses an intuitive traffic light scheme to show the severity of the drought for the upcoming weeks. Select a specific time period and choose to look at predictions of the Rhine discharge for the model region of Lobith or at a map that shows the precipitation deficit in all of the Netherlands. Historical data from the past two months, provided by Rijkswaterstaat (Dutch Water Management Authority), are available as well as forecasts for the upcoming months as provided by the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI). The applications are interactive. You can hover over the graphs for more details about individual models or points of time and you can choose between different views. This way, the app supports different groups of stakeholders in evaluating the effects of upcoming weather events.
Figure 2. Interactive visualization of time-series data for the Rhine river discharge in Lobith.
Video tutorial for the Rijnland LL https://youtu.be/ibxri8IrLpo?si=iEOTU_FA1oDVtW6u
Conclusion
We have found that using co-design to guide developments proved to be very valuable and gave the project’s platform a meaningful goal.
[1] I-CISK is launched under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme of the European Union.