Mapping the landscape of climate services

Abstract

Climate services are technology-intensive, science-based and user-tailored tools providing timely climate information to a wide set of users. They accelerate innovation, while contributing to societal adaptation. Research has explored the advancements of climate services in multiple fields, producing a wealth of interdisciplinary knowledge ranging from climatology to the social sciences. The aim of this paper is to map the global landscape of research on climate services and to identify patterns at individual, affiliation and country level and the structural properties of each community. We use a sample of 358 records published between 1974 and 2018 and quantitatively analyze them. We provide insights into the main characteristics of the community of climate services through Bibliometrics and complement these findings with Network Science. We have computed the centrality of each actor as derived from a Principal Component Analysis of 42 different measures. By exploring the structural properties of the networks of individuals, institutions and countries we derive implications on the most central agents. Furthermore, we detect brokers in the network, capable of facilitating the information flow and increasing the cohesion of the community. We finally analyze the abstracts of the sample via Content Analysis. We find a progressive shift towards climate adaptation and usercentric visions. Agriculture and Energy are the top mentioned sectors. Anglophone countries and institutions are quantitatively dominant, and they are also important in connecting different discipline of the network of scholars, by building on established partnerships. Finding that nodes facilitating the diffusion of information flows (the brokers) are not necessarily the most central, but have a high degree of interdisciplinarity facilitating interactions of different communities. Social media abstract. #WhoisWho in #climateservices? A comprehensive map of research in #Europe and beyond OPEN ACCESS RECEIVED

Mapping pathways to public understanding of climate science

“…Fully documenting why Decision-making and Stakeholder Engagement is relatively cognitively isolated would require a different research approach than used here. But because the network map reveals this structural hole, and because effective climate service provision relies on participatory processes which produce not only the transfer of scientific information, but also engagement, tacit buy-in, and trust-building (Larosa and Mysiak, 2019), this could be a particularly fruitful avenue to explore for integrating research and practice in climate communication. Climate services and other activities carried out by Decision-making and Stakeholder Engagement researchers could benefit from the broad array of tools studied and practiced in the other knowledge communities; similarly, researchers from other knowledge communities might benefit from having a living laboratory where climate communication strategies could be developed, applied, or tested.…”

“…These bibliometric techniques have been applied to some aspects of climate (e.g. Huo et al, 2021; Larosa and Mysiak, 2019; Lemos et al, 2019) and science communication (e.g. Gerber et al, 2020; Suerdem et al, 2013), generally without network analysis and visualization.…”

Smart Climate Hydropower Tool: A Machine-Learning Seasonal Forecasting Climate Service to Support Cost–Benefit Analysis of Reservoir Management

“…This group includes the range of machine learning methods and models that do not use a validation dataset as a means for early stopping the training procedure. SCHT is rooted in co-development with the target user, following the progressive shift on climate services from developer-centric perspectives towards climate adaptation and user-centric visions [72]. This approach works through two complementary channels: (i) the optimisation of energy production reducing the risks and costs associated with inefficient production; (ii) the improve existing operations, the service forecasts the energy volumes given changing short-terms climate conditions.…”

The iCOLT climate service: Seasonal predictions of irrigation for Emilia‐Romagna, Italy

“…GFCS is organized into priority areas, including agriculture and food security, disaster risk reduction, energy, health and water. This structure testifies the climate services wide‐ranging domain through the society sectors affected by weather (Larosa & Mysiak, 2019). At European level, climate services are defined as the intelligence behind the transition to a climate‐resilient and low‐carbon society, priorities pursued by the EU Green Deal, as they provide support to increasing resilience and enhance adaptive capacities by means of informed decisions (European Commission, 2015).…”