Towards Transformative Climate Services: Community Building, Co-Creation, and Communication. Lessons learned from Climateurope2 project.

Climate services play a critical role in bridging scientific knowledge and societal needs, enabling informed decision-making for climate adaptation and mitigation. However, their effectiveness depends not only on scientific robustness, but also on inclusive co-creation processes, shared standards, and strong communities of practice that connect researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and users. This contribution presents the experience of Climateurope2, a European project coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, as a case study demonstrating how community-driven approaches can advance trustworthy, accessible, and impactful climate services.

Climateurope2 aims to strengthen and expand the European climate services ecosystem by developing recommendations and standardisation procedures while fostering uptake of quality-assured climate services. Central to the project is the deliberate cultivation of an open and diverse climate services community, built through a wide range of participatory activities that prioritize bottom-up engagement and transdisciplinary exchange. In particular, the project has organized a series of interactive webstivals and festivals designed as co-creation spaces, where researchers, service providers, policy makers, private sector actors, and local stakeholders collaboratively explore needs, methodologies, tools, and future directions for climate services.

These events have facilitated knowledge integration across multiple domains, including Earth observation data, climate modelling, socio-economic analysis, and local knowledge systems, contributing to the development of more user-relevant and context-sensitive climate services. They also address common challenges in the field, such as fragmented data accessibility, limited dialogue between disciplines, and difficulties in scaling services across sectors and regions.

A distinctive feature of Climateurope2 is its strong emphasis on communication as an enabling mechanism for co-creation and societal impact. The project has invested in innovative communication formats and inclusive language to make climate science and services more accessible to policy makers, practitioners, and wider audiences. This effort includes a Traveling Climate Action Roadshow across the Southeast Europe that promotes climate services through the integration of art and science; two dedicated art–science calls designed to foster dialogue between artists and the scientific community, resulting in the creation of artistic works addressing key project themes and translating complex climate service concepts into accessible narratives for wider audiences; and the production of the “Climate at your Service” podcast, which offers an engaging entry point to understanding the role of climate services and their standardisation in supporting climate adaptation and informed decision-making.

By reflecting on lessons learned from community-building, co-creation practices, and communication strategies, this contribution highlights how transdisciplinary collaboration and shared standards can empower a broad range of stakeholders. The Climateurope2 experience offers transferable insights for advancing climate services that are not only scientifically sound, but also socially robust, scalable, and transformative across diverse socio-ecological contexts.