Sharing skills and needs between providers and users of climate information to create climate services: lessons from the Northern Adriatic case study

Abstract

The need to cope with the expected impacts of climate change on socio-ecological systems calls for a closer dialogue between climate scientists and the community of climate information users. We describe an interactive process designed to bridge this gap by establishing a two-way communication, based on mutual learning. We analyse the need of climate information for the integrated assessment of climate change impacts on the coastal zone of the Northern Adriatic Sea, which is considered to be particularly vulnerable to several climate-related phenomena, e.g. heavy rainfall events, pluvial flood, and sea level rise, causing potentially high damage to coastal ecosystems and urban areas (e.g. acqua alta in the Venice Lagoon). A participatory process was designed engaging representatives from both the scientific and local stakeholders communities, and facilitated by a boundary organization, embodied by the Euro-Mediterranean Center on Climate Change. End-users of climate information (e.g. decision makers belonging to public institutions) were selected among representatives of those public institutions having a specific mandate for Integrated Coastal Zone Management, and engaged to identify their needs. During the early stages of the interaction process, several priorities were identified, including: (1) data to support land-use planning, (2) data with greater resolution and longer time series, (3) data on climate impacts and risks, (4) precipitation patterns to improve irrigation, (5) sea level rise and tides, (6) climate variations and extreme events, (7) seasonal trend for tidal waves, and (8) hydraulic risk. Three climate products were developed to address these needs: (1) short-term projections of sea level rise; (2) seasonal predictions of extreme rainfall events; (3) long-term regional projections of climate extremes (including heat waves, dry spells and heavy rainfall events). Additionally, two risk products were developed: 4) sea level rise inundation risk maps for the low-lying coastal areas of Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia regions; and 5) pluvial flood risk maps for the urban territory of the municipality of Venice.

A Multi-Risk Methodology for the Assessment of Climate Change Impacts in Coastal Zones

“…Overall, the local stakeholders and experts have joined a series of workshops organized by the authors of the paper within the FP7 research projects CLIM-RUN and PEGASO. As specified in the related publications [74,82], the local stakeholders and experts engaged in the MRA included public institutions with a specific mandate for Integrated Coastal Zone Management (ICZM) in the Veneto and Friuli-Venezia Giulia Regions (e.g., environmental protection agencies, managers of protected areas, and representatives of geological surveys and regional meteorological services). The participatory process engaged 37 people involved by means of surveys, local workshops, and focus groups (Table S1).…”

Systematic investigation of skill opportunities in decadal prediction of air temperature over Europe

“…For this reason, both public and private sectors are growingly fostering the development of operational climate services based on near-term predictions (Vaughan and Dessai, 2014;Buontempo et al, 2014;Street, 2016). Climate services aim at providing customized products for decision makers in climate-sensitive sectors, thus creating a bridge between the academic world and the end-users by translating scienti c outcomes into targeted information (Goddard, 2016;Giannini et al, 2016). Yet, the development of a climate service needs to be based on trustable climate predictions (Lemos et al, 2012, Mehta et al, 2013, and so its effective operability requires a scrupulous evaluation of the actual skill of the existing prediction systems in simulating the near-term climate evolution, notably in those speci c contexts that are relevant for the targeted analysis (Bruno Soares et al, 2017).…”

Framing Climate Services: Logics, Actors, and Implications for Policies and Projects

“…The interface frame is extremely widespread in academic production. The vast majority of such publications come from peer-reviewed articles [16,[93][94][95][96] or working papers from collaborative platforms [14,[97][98][99]. This frame is at least partially inspired by some fields of science and technology studies (STS), as they share many common themes: the science-policy interface, the role of technology and innovation, models of knowledge production, and communication.…”

“…Three themes are included in this frame, sometimes overlapping one another: (1) the existence of a gap between the users and producers of information [92,94,100]; (2) what constitutes usable and/or useful information [16,96,101]; (3) the use of information [102,103]. The first one is the underlying postulate for every publication in this frame: the assessment is that information is under-used and a gap between users and producers remains [33].…”