Climate services

From the devastating effects of the 1877–1879 Great Drought in the Northeast region to the creation of the Center for Weather Forecast and Climate Studies (CPTEC) at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in the early 1990 s, Brazil went from a total absence of meteorological expertise to becoming a member of a select group of nations with the infrastructure and technical expertise to build and run a global general circulation model. This article reviews the most critical moments in the development of climate services in Brazil, addressing the evolution of its infrastructure for observation, monitoring, modeling, and prediction, the still incipient efforts in systematically understanding users’ perspectives and needs, and the work required to incorporate the usable science and co-production paradigms into the main centers of production of climate information. Advances and challenges are analyzed, and actions for strengthening the climate services framework are proposed.

Extreme Event Attribution has raised increasing attention in climate science in the last years. It means to judge the extent to which certain weather-related extreme events have changed due to human influences on climate with probabilistic statements. Extreme Event Attribution is often anticipated to spur more than just scientific ambition. It is able to provide answers to a commonly asked questions after extreme events, namely, 'can we blame it on climate change' and is assumed to support decision-making of various actors engaged in climate change mitigation and adaptation. More in-depth research is widely lacking about who these actors are; in which context they can make use of it; and what requirements they have, to be able to actually apply Extreme Event Attribution. We have therefore addressed these questions with two empirical case studies looking at regional decision-makers who deal with storm surge risks in the German Baltic Sea region and heat waves in the Greater Paris area. Stakeholder interviews and workshops reveal that fields of application and requirements are diverse, difficult to explicitly identify, and often clearly associated with stakeholders' specific mandate, the hazard background, and the regional socioeconomic setting. Among the considered stakeholders in the Baltic Sea region, Extreme Event Attribution is perceived to be most useful to awareness-raising, in particular for climate change mitigation. They emphasised the importance of receiving understandable information-and that, rather later, but with smaller uncertainties than faster, but with higher uncertainties. In the Paris case, we typically talked to people engaged in adaptation with expertise in terms of climate science, but narrowly defined mandates which is typical for the Paris-centred political system with highly specialised public experts. The interviewees claimed that Extreme Event Attribution is most useful to political leverage and public discourses. If novel information like this is not sorted out a priori, it needs to be clearly linked to impacts, preferably as monetary values lost. These examples underline the significance of conducting case-specific stakeholder mappings and consultation. Overall, our studies can thereby provide methods and exemplary empirical evidence to support developing useful services from Extreme Event Attribution for targeted groups of users.

The project EU-MACS is funded by the EU (Horizon programme) and aims to clarify how the market for climate services could abound by improving the matching of supply of and demand for climate services (CS). CS are understood as services that include transformation of climate related data – often together with other relevant information -  into customized information products, offered as such or embedded in consultancy and/or education. EU-MACS runs from November 2016 to November 2018. The study generates a series of Deliverables (mostly reports). This Deliverable 1.2 discusses (1) encountered business models and resourcing for CS provision, (2) quality assurance of CS provision, and (3) the significance of legislation in creating demand for CS.

The field of climate services for development (CSD) is growing rapidly, presented by donors and implementers as an opportunity to address the needs of the global poor, whether informing agricultural decision-making in rural communities, facilitating disaster preparedness or promoting public health. To realise this potential, however, CSD projects must understand the information needs of their intended users. This raises a critical epistemological challenge for CSD: how can we know who is vulnerable to the impacts of climate variability and change, and why are they vulnerable to particular impacts? In this paper, we consider both the epistemological tension arising over the construction of vulnerability that emerges at the intersection of the physical and social science communities within CSD and a second, less-discussed epistemological stress surrounding how user identities are under- stood within the social science community engaged in CSD-related research and implementation.We illustrate these tensions through the example of a climate services programme that delivers agrometeorological advice to farmers in Mali, demonstrating the ramifications of these epistemological issues for the design and delivery of services that further development and adaptation goals.

In this introduction, we situate the topic of this Special Issue on 'narratives of change' in the scholarly literature about how we inform climate risk governance, including through climate services. We argue that many places experience a persistent mismatch between predominantly science-based and technical framings of climatic risk on the one hand, and the place-based un-derstandings of climate extremes and responses of people living in these places on the other. We introduce the case studies presented in this issue and highlight their common focus on 'narratives of change' as one missing link in climate governance. Narratives of change address the past, present and future of a specific place understood as a weather-world, adding a cultural dimension to climate change experienced as a succession of weather and seasons. We focus on memories of extreme weather events and how people coped with them, in order to improve climate gov-ernance under future climatic change. We argue that attention to local narratives expands the scope of issues covered by climate information and improves its integration into social and cultural life. We offer up seven lessons for why it is important to incorporate narratives in climate governance and suggest some creative methods for doing so. Post-normal science, art-science cooperation, and the inclusion of the humanities mark the difference that the individual contributions make to the literature about climate governance and democratic decision-making. 1. Narratives and climate risk governance "We tell ourselves stories in order to live", the writer Joan Didion (2009, 11) famously stated. "We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices". What kind of stories do we tell about a changing climate, about extreme weather, rising sea level or changes in the seasons? Which story is the most workable to locally make sense of a global phenomenon and its effects? In this special issue, we bring together place-based stories about climate change with scientific information. Climate change is materializing locally in different ways, both as a change of weather and a change of politics. Climate change already plays a role in shifting governance and decision-making regimes in all of the places discussed in this special issue, yet none could claim to have made their endangered communities 'climate proof'. The articles in this issue argue for the inclusion of local narratives of change, alongside climate science, for a broader and critical understanding of climate risk governance. Local narratives serve to improve knowledge of the impacts of climatic change (the problem framing), introduce local ways of relating to and coping with these changes, and root https://doi.

CLIMANDES is a pilot twinning project between the National Weather Services of Peru and Switzerland (SENAMHI and MeteoSwiss), developed within the Global Framework for Climate Services of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). Split in two modules, CLIMANDES aims at improving education in meteorology and climatology in support of the WMO Regional Training Center in Peru, and introducing user-tailored climate services in two pilot regions in the Peruvian Andes. Four areas were prioritized in the first phase of CLIMANDES lasting from 2012 to 2015 to introduce climate services in Peru. A demand study identified the user needs of climate services and showed that climate information must be reliable, of high-quality, and precise. The information should be accessible and timely, understandable and applicable for the users' specific needs. Second, the quality of climate data was enhanced through the establishment of quality control and homogenization procedures at SENAMHI. Specific training and application of the implemented methods at stations in the pilot regions was promoted to ensure the sustainability of the work. Third, the specific work on climate data enabled the creation of a webpage to disseminate climate indicators among users. The forth priority of the project enhanced the broad communication strategy of SENAMHI through creation of a specialized network of journalists, diverse climate forums, and the establishment of a user database. The efforts accomplished within CLIMANDES improved the quality of the climate services provided by SENAMHI. The project hence contributed successfully to higher awareness and higher confidence in the climate information by SENAMHI.

The production of relevant knowledge that assists decision making is one of the many challenges facing the broad spectrum of natural and social sciences today. Responding to social demands requires contributions that cross disciplinary boundaries and promote dialogues not only between different disciplines but also that include diverse social actors. This work presents reflections on different instances of co-production of knowledge in the framework of an inter/transdisciplinary and multinational research project on climate services in South America - Collaborative Research Network IAI-CRN3035. During the course of the five years of the project, various collaboration activities between information producers and users of the agricultural sector have been developed, and diverse instances of formal and informal discussion and exchange of knowledge among project participants have been promoted. These experiences has highlighted the challenges and potential of inter/transdisciplinary practices, in terms of language, methodologies and communication, among other considerations that can contribute to collective reflection.