Operationalising a National Framework for Climate Services in Ireland

Ireland’s National Framework for Climate Services (NFCS), established in 2022, facilitates collaboration between climate information providers and users to deliver user-driven climate services. It promotes knowledge exchange, integrates robust scientific advances, and supports Ireland’s climate resilience efforts by signposting relevant climate information and promoting existing tools to avoid duplication of effort.

It is built on the outputs from across the climate services community, including the TRANSLATE project which provides standardised bias-corrected climate change projections for Ireland. The TRANSLATE program was the seed that led to the formation of this permanent national framework. 

The establishment of an NFCS in Ireland followed a low-risk, high-impact, “project-first” approach to understand the national relevance and appetite for a coordinated approach to climate services. Rather than begin with an NFCS, and be unsure of its interest or value, this “project-first” approach allowed Met Éireann, (the national met service in Ireland), to identify relevant stakeholders, evaluate engagement and discover potential problems. As projects are time bound, this was a low-risk method of determining appetite for a more permanent national solution to provision and sharing of climate information.

Here we describe an “all-of-government” approach to building permanent mechanisms and structures for developing and maintaining sustainable and scalable climate services and partnerships across the science-policy-user interface by establishing an inclusive NFCS. We explore the successes, challenges, barriers and lessons learned in forming and operationalising of an NFCS in Ireland, offering insights for climate service providers internationally.

By the end of 2024, (the first year of an operational NFCS), some notable achievements include:

• The NFCS has hosted two national forums, the first to identify NFCS priorities, and the second on addressing uncertainty in climate information.
• NFCS Annual Forum: Spanning two days for producers and users, it highlighted key directions for the NFCS for the coming years. It also highlighted the key role the NFCS can play in in supporting and facilitating knowledge transfer and learning across the community.
• NFCS National Forum: Handling uncertainty in climate information.
• A permanent identity has been established through a dedicated webpage, branding, an operational online help desk and a quarterly newsletter.
• Thematic hubs have been created, pulling together relevant data, services and communications from across the climate services community.
• It has supported and facilitated the development of key national climate change programs. These include the National Adaptation Framework, the National Climate Change Risk Assessment and sectoral adaptation plans.
• Ireland’s NFCS was featured in the WMO’s 2024 State of Climate Services report as a case study, showcasing its impact across sectors like the built environment, transport, water, and agriculture.