Climate Services Ecosystems: an opportunity to increase optimization

Societies use climate services as part of their mitigation and adaptation strategies to a changing climate (e.g., Cortekar et al., 2016; Vaughan and Dessai, 2014; Scott, Lemieux and Malon, 2011), and have been defined and framed around particular single applications or sectors, either agriculture, health, energy, water management or disaster risk management (WMO, 2009, Council, 2001)- just to mention a few. Whilst this can bring potential benefits such as high specialization and adaptation (WMO, 2019; Lemos, 2015), co-benefits of articulated climate services among different sectors have not been fully assessed in the broader societal system, where these are developed and implemented. Understanding and valuing the nexus between the sectors during the design, development and implementation of climate services might help project optimization, and eventually benefit the community, country, entire region or society.

Climate services ecosystems are defined -slightly modifying the business-perspective definition of Vargo and Akaka (2012)- as relatively self-contained, self-adjusting systems of resource-integrating actors connected by shared institutional goals, and mutual-value creation through exchange of climate services (Goddard, Gonzalez Romero, et al., 2020). In other words, a climate-services ecosystem involves interactions between different sectors sharing the same or similar climate services, which enhances resilience, and lends efficiency and value, by optimally orchestrating the available solutions. These ecosystems tend to be more robust to climate impacts than a collection of climate services focused on certain applications or just one sector, because shocks to one part of the ecosystem are redistributed and dampened through the entire network.

 

Since by definition these ecosystems take advantage of existing climate services in different society-relevant sectors, the overall benefit is directly dependent on the ecosystem configuration itself. The ability to scale high-quality climate services, not just to other locations but to other sectors, and the ability for these climate-service networks to organize into ecosystems is hypothesized to be a crucial ingredient to resilience in the face of climate variability and change, given that resources are finite.The analysis of the ecosystems though Dynamical Casual Network Theory allows us to understand, characterize and forsee potential behaviour and changes in relationships between the elements of the networks, supporting the decision-making processes within. In combination with projects like Climateurope2, this concept of climate services ecosystems can help with the standardization of climate services.