Climate education is often underestimated, both in terms of the role it can play in meeting the challenges of climate change, and with regards the difficulty of delivering it effectively. Climate change poses not only interdisciplinary scientific challenges around understanding the problem, but also socio-economic, technological, ethical and political challenges to implement appropriate responses at local to global scales. To rise to these challenges there is a growing need for climate education approaches and resources that adopt integrative learning objectives and pedagogically effective practices. Key objectives of climate education include furthering learners’ content knowledge of climate science and options for action (e.g., climate feedbacks, impacts, adaptation measures, renewable energy), cultivating science and communication skills (e.g., quantitative literacy, critical thinking, writing to inform), and initiating positive attitudes and actions (e.g., empathy and behavioural change).

This session invites contributions on climate education and outreach across all age levels (primary, high school and adult), settings (formal and informal) and approaches (e.g., websites, lab demos, serious games, pedagogic research, course design, citizen science, filmmaking, art). Contributions related to upper primary and middle school levels and those concerning adaptation of technical scientific materials for teaching, are particularly encouraged. The session is an opportunity for educators, resource developers, pedagogical experts and scientists to network and share ideas and research on climate education.

Climate services challenge the traditional interface between users and providers of climate information as it requires the establishment of a dialogue between subjects, who often have limited knowledge of each-other’s activities and practices. Increasing the understanding and usability of climate information for societal use has become a major challenge where economic growth, and social development crucially depends on adaptation to climate variability and change.

To this regard, climate services do not only create user-relevant climate information, but also stimulate the need to quantify vulnerabilities and come up with appropriate adaptation solutions that can be applied in practice.

The operational generation, management and delivery of climate services poses a number of new challenges to the traditional way of accessing and distributing climate data. With a growing private sector playing the role of service provider is important to understand what are the roles and the responsibilities of the publicly funded provision of climate data and information and services.

This session aims to gather best practices and lessons learnt, for how climate services can successfully facilitate adaptation to climate variability and change by providing climate information that is tailored to the real user need.
Contributions are strongly encouraged from international efforts (GFCS, CSP, ClimatEurope…); European Initiatives (H2020, ERA4CS, C3S, JPI-Climate…) as well as national, regional and local experiences.

Cities all over the world are facing rising population densities. This leads to increasing fractions of built-up and sealed areas, consequencing in a more and more altered and partly disrupted water balance - both in terms of water quantities and qualities. On top, climate change is altering precipitation regimes.

This session focuses on according urban ecohydrological problems and approaches to solve them spanning from technical to nature-based solutions in different time and spatial scales from the building to the whole city.