Accelerating Climate Service Development for Renewable Energy, Finance and Cities

Abstract

Wider applications of climate services within the management of climate risks face significant challenges. This paper presents a forecasting approach, to assess the development trends in climate service needs and thereby potential demand in key sectors that are essential to the green solution and will face a general growth in activity and key climate vulnerabilities towards 2050. These sectors are renewable energy, international climate finance, and cities. The geographical scope focuses on Europe, but global trends are included. We here suggest scenarios for growth in future climate services based on baseline development trends and policy scenarios reflecting future low-emission and SDG targets. Barriers and specific needs for climate service development within these sectors are discussed, and alignment of supply and demand within the climate service market is particularly emphasized. We find that several complexities influence the climate service market, including policy frameworks aimed at facilitating climate risk management as well as a lack of fit between the supply and demand sides of the market. Other barriers include uncertainties related to available climate information and socioeconomic climate risk information. Based on the forecasting, we find that substantial benefits can be seen with increased climate service development and deployment across the three sectors.

A Pathway towards Climate Services for the Agricultural Sector

“…Directly or indirectly, the energy sector is connected to the weather and climate. Wind, solar, and hydropower, which can be transformed into electricity, are influenced by the atmospheric conditions when the needs for buildings' heating and cooling are affected by the weather and climate [65,66]. CSs offer insights into long-term climatic patterns, assisting utilities and energy firms to plan for anticipated changes in energy demand and their effects on energy infrastructure.…”

Climate Services for Renewable Energy in the Nordic Electricity Market

“…Quantitative data used in this study have been obtained from the sources of [25][26][27][28][29][30]39,59,60] and qualitative data on the CS supply chain are from the sources of [6,7,18,19,21,[41][42][43][44][45].…”

“…Hence, the systemic efficiency of wind and solar power critically depends on the installed capacity for electricity storage, interactions between the different sources of power on the electricity market, and the flexibility of other sources, including both conventional energy conversion technologies and other renewables. To ensure the robust and sustainable supply and demand while facing an uncertain climatic future, requires efficient cross-technology integration and, in turn, close collaboration and communication between end-users and climate service/data providers [6][7][8] in order to mediate imminent challenges such as data accessibility, formats and commercial interests [9]. Non-technological barriers include political, social and legal challenges [10,11], but are all outside the scope of this study.…”

“…Accurate and tailored information on the impacts of climate change on short and long-term variability and the scale of the renewable energy potentials is essential and will be the key to the effective transformation of the energy sector under a changing climate [17]. Thus, dedicated "climate services" (CSs) are likely to become increasingly important for future investments in the electricity sector and for markets and will play an important role in promoting the efficient large-scale penetration of renewables [6]. To exemplify, when trading spot and futures contracts on electricity markets, traders rely on estimates of future supply and demand.…”

“…Parts of the supply chain with potential climate services (CS) use and needs, obtained from[6,7,18,19,21,[41][42][43][44][45].…”