Co-production pathway of an end-to-end climate service for improved decision-making in the wine sector

Abstract

Climate services are one of the tools that can support the agriculture sector to address the impacts of climate change on agricultural production systems, not only considering climatic aspects but also social needs. This work describes the knowledge co-production journey of the EU-funded project MED-GOLD to create an end-to-end climate service for wine sector users. In this work, co-production is understood as an iterative, interactive and collaborative process among an interdisciplinary group of scientists and users that were engaged, involved, and empowered. The co-production process included activities to raise awareness on the vulnerability of grape and wine production to climate change, exchange knowledge between climate service providers and users, and co-develop customised climate services, such as the MED-GOLD Dashboard. Lessons learned are that repeated interaction between scientists and users allow to better frame research questions, jointly decide how to address these questions, and test the outcomes with feedback from real-world decision-makers. Furthermore, having a user who co-developed the service and helped assess its added value was key to ensure that it could truly inform decision-making needs and to promote its broader uptake by the wine sector community. Although the MED-GOLD Dashboard constitutes the most tangible result of this collaboration, the outcomes of co-production also encompass the joint learning process, the shared sense of ownership, and the co-creation of new knowledge between scientists and stakeholders. Nevertheless, further research will be needed to understand how the knowledge coproduced with a single user can be scaled up to users with other profiles and requirements.

Keywords

• Knowledge exchange
• Dashboard
• Climate predictions
• Agriculture
• User engagement
• Communication