The Climate Information platform: A climate science basis for climate adaptation and mitigation activities in developing countries

The World Meteorological Organization (WMO), the Green Climate Fund (GCF) and the Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI) are collaborating on a project providing expert services for enhancing the climate science basis of GCF-funded activities. The goal is to ensure that the causal links between climate and climate impacts, and between climate action and societal benefits, are fully grounded in the best available climate data and science.  Five pilot countries are participating in this phase of the project: St Lucia, Democratic Republic of Congo, Cape Verde, Cambodia, and Paraguay, with an audience of national experts, international stakeholders, and policy and decision makers.

The scientific framework which we follow here is a compendium of available data, methods and tools for analysing and documenting the past, present and potential future climate conditions which a GCF-funded project or adaptation plan might seek to address. Through the WMO-GCF-SMHI project, the methodology, scientific framework, data, methods and tools to link global to local data are complemented by hands-on support, backed by access to relevant data and tools through a structured access platform.

In this presentation we elaborate on the lessons learnt from a number of workshops that were designed for the five pilot countries. The main focus of the workshops was a hands-on opportunity of national experts and international stakeholders to work with the WMO methodology in order to develop a GCF proposal for future funding. The participants in each country worked intensively during a five-day workshop on each step of the methodology: Problem definition, Identification of climate science basis, Interpretation of data analysis, selection of best adaptation/mitigation options, and assessment of adaptation/mitigation effectiveness.

Assessing past and current climate and climate projections is the basis for inferring real and potential climate change and related impacts. For this, SMHI has developed a new interactive online platform/service (https://climateinformation.org/) to facilitate the communication between the GCF and developing countries and provide access to state of the art climate data to be used in impact assessment planning. The new service provides data for robust climate analysis to underpin decision-making when planning measures for climate adaptation or mitigation. Readily available climate indicators will help defining future problems, assess climatic stressors, and analyse current and future risks. This makes a climate case, which is the basis for developing interventions and propose investments. In particular the service provides:

• Easy access to many climate indicators, based on state-of-the-art climate science.
• Instant summary reports of climate change for any site on the globe.
• Guidance on how to link global changes to local observations.