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

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.