Harnessing decision timelines to improve understanding and integration of local and scientific knowledges across the Climate Services value chain

Climate services are increasingly being co-produced through a negotiation process between climate service providers, purveyors, and end users. Their different knowledge systems (scientific and local) determine to a large extent this process. Local knowledge, covers a range of different knowledges, and includes how individuals perceive their surroundings, validate new information such as coming from science-based climate services, and solve problems. As such, local knowledge holders can range from indigenous, rural, or urban communities to professionals working at various levels of governance and various positions across the climate services value chain (e.g., service providers and purveyors).

Given the diversity of knowledges and knowledge holders, the actual integration of local knowledge in a climate service is challenging. In this research, we present an approach to collect, understand, and integrate local knowledge for climate services through the utilization of decision timelines. Decision timelines are effective tools for elucidating and understanding the decision-making process, allowing stakeholders to visualise changes and patterns over time (e.g., months, seasons, multiple years, etc). Through visual representation, decision timelines offer an effective way to understand links between different knowledges, stimulate discussions, co-design, and co-evaluate climate services with users. Traditionally such timelines have been limited to agricultural users to introduce the topic of climate information and how it relates to the key decisions that farmers need to make. However, in this research, we expand the scope of these timelines to different sectors (e.g., tourism, urban environment) and also to other actors in the climate services value chain (so not only the end user of a climate service). The timelines are instrumental to understand the decision-making over time and to elicit environmental and socio-economic cues (from local or scientific knowledge). Making timelines for those actors more upstream in the climate services value chain also allows to understand the co-production and knowledge management underpinning the governance process and climate service provision itself. We present examples from the different living labs that have been established in the I-CISK project (an EU research initiative), where these decision timelines have been used as a tool to elicit and understand local knowledge.