Standardisation of equitable climate services by supporting a community of practice

Abstract

Climate services are essential to support climate-sensitive decision making, enabling adaptation to climate change and variability, and mitigate the sources of anthropogenic climate change, while taking into account the values and contexts of those involved. The unregulated nature of climate services can lead to low market performance and lack of quality assurance. Best practices, guidance, and standards serve as a form of governance, ensuring quality, legitimacy, and relevance of climate services. The Climateurope2 project (www.climateurope2.eu) addresses this gap by engaging and supporting an equitable and diverse community of climate services to provide recommendations for their standardisation. Four components of climate services are identified (the decision context, the ecosystem of actors and co-production processes, the multiple knowledge systems involved, and the delivery and evaluation of these services) to facilitate analysis. This has resulted in the identification of nine key messages summarising the susceptibility for the climate services standardisation. The recommendations are shared with relevant standardisation bodies and actors as well as with climate services stakeholders and providers.

Keywords

• Climate services
• Governance
• Standards
• Quality assurance
• Equity