EGU22-10661, updated on 28 Mar 2022
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-10661
EGU General Assembly 2022
© Author(s) 2022. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

I-CISK: Towards a social and behaviourally informed approach to co-producing climate services

Micha Werner1, Ilyas Masih1, Rebecca Emerton2, Ilias Pechlivanidis3, Marije Schaafsma4, Lluís Pesquer5, Giuliano di Baldassare6, Marc van den Homberg7, Stefano Bagli8, Megi Gamtkitsulashvili9, Lucia De Stefano10, Benedikt Gräler11, Györgyi Bela12, and Apostolis Tzimas13
Micha Werner et al.
  • 1IHE Delft Institute for Water Education, Department of Water Resources & Ecosystems, Delft, the Netherlands (m.werner@un-ihe.org)
  • 2European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), Reading, UK
  • 3Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute (SMHI), Norrköping, Sweden
  • 4Department of Environmental Economics, Institute for Environmental Studies, Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands
  • 5Centre de Recerca Ecològica i Aplicacions Forestals (CREAF), Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Vallès), Catalonia, Spain
  • 6Department of Earth Sciences, Uppsala University, Uppsala, Sweden
  • 7510 An Initiative of The Netherlands Red Cross, The Hague, Netherlands
  • 8GECOsistema Srl, Cesena, Italy
  • 9Caucasus Environmental NGO Network Association (CENN), Tblisi, Georgia
  • 10Facultad de Ciencias Geológicas, Depto. Geodinámica, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Madrid, Spain
  • 1152°North Initiative for Geospatial Open Source Software GmbH, Münster, Germany
  • 12IDEAS Science KFT, Budapest, Hungary
  • 13EMVIS Consultant Engineers, Athens, Greece

Climate Services (CS) are crucial in empowering citizens, stakeholders and decision-makers in defining resilient pathways to adapt to climate change and extreme events. Whilst recent decades have seen significant advances in the science that underpins CS; from sub-seasonal, seasonal through to climate scale predictions; there are several barriers to the uptake of CS and realising of the full opportunity of their value-proposition. Challenges include incorporating the social and behavioural factors, and the local knowledge and customs of climate services users; the poorly developed understanding of the multi-temporal and multi-scalar dimension of climate-related impacts and actions; the translation of CS-provided data into actionable information; and, the consideration of reinforcing or balancing feedback loops associated to users’ decisions.

The ambition of the recently initiated EU-H2020 I-CISK research & innovation project in addressing these challenges, is to instigate a step-change to co-producing CS through a social and behaviourally informed approach. The trans-disciplinary framework the research sets out to develop recognises that climate relevant decisions consider multiple knowledges; innovating CS through integrating local knowledge, perceptions and preferences of users with scientific climate data and predictions.

In this contribution we reflect on initial steps in setting up seven living labs in climate hotspots in Europe and Africa. Instrumental to the research, we will work from these living labs with multi-actor platforms that span multiple sectors to co-design, co-create, co-implement, and co-evaluate pre-operational CS to address climate change and extremes (droughts, floods and heatwaves). We present the vision and plans of the I-CISK project, and explore links, contributions and collaborations with existing projects and networks within the community of CS research and practice. 

How to cite: Werner, M., Masih, I., Emerton, R., Pechlivanidis, I., Schaafsma, M., Pesquer, L., di Baldassare, G., van den Homberg, M., Bagli, S., Gamtkitsulashvili, M., De Stefano, L., Gräler, B., Bela, G., and Tzimas, A.: I-CISK: Towards a social and behaviourally informed approach to co-producing climate services, EGU General Assembly 2022, Vienna, Austria, 23–27 May 2022, EGU22-10661, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu22-10661, 2022.