Co-developing and co-designing climate services for the Baltic, Black, and Mediterranean Seas: the contribution of RIVIERADE project

Delivering validated climate services for resilient European Seas on a decadal to multi-decadal horizon is a challenge. The recently started HEU RIVIERADE project brings together the scientific communities geared into CORDEX and the Copernicus Marine Service and capitalizes on their unique scientific experience to develop and implement a pre-operational and replicable multi-model framework and protocols to produce, downscale, assess and deliver state-of-the-art decadal predictions and multi-decadal projections of climate change and related impacts on marine ecosystems, covering the basin scale and the coastal areas, up to, and including, development and demonstration of climate services.

RIVIERADE will target three European Seas (Baltic, Black, Mediterranean), to produce data and information for ocean health, sustainable blue economy, and coastal climate risks, downstreaming the data flow from climate ensembles to coastal areas at different spatial resolutions and for selected areas, in a circular process based on users and stakeholders engagement, co-design and assessment of innovative climate services.

The RIVIERADE process of co-design and co-development of regional ocean climate impact/risk services and of regional ocean climate services supporting blue economy will be carried out through engagement of stakeholders and perspective users, in order to foster a continuous interaction between end-users and scientists to identify and prioritise societal needs.

We present the methodological charter adopted to codesign and test the RIVIERADE climate services demonstrators. The interaction with stakeholders and end-users firstly includes the setting-up of an Users and Stakeholders Advisory Board (USAB) since the beginning of the activities. USAB will be composed by sectoral coordinating organizations (e.g., territorial decision-makers, regional environmental commissions, national technology clusters, research institutions) who have already expressed interest in joining us or belong to collaboration networks already established by the project partnership. Starting from the prioritised contacts identified by the umbrella organizations present in USAB, a representative sample of specific end-users will be identified and engaged to co-design and co-develop demonstrators for the three regional seas. Scoping workshops will be organised at the early stage of the project to present the innovative tools that will be developed in RIVIERADE, to identify and prioritise the specific needs of users involved in terms of data, information and knowledge required, as well as related spatial and temporal scales. A relevant expected outcome of the USAB workshops will be to build a common terminology, to be adopted in the project and beyond, between users and providers of services to smooth the overall co-design process and the following activities of testing and validation of the services. Subsequently, the effectiveness of the demonstrators will be assessed by analysing their support on critical decisions focusing on critical years/events selected by the users. Finally, the value of demonstrators in supporting decision-making processes for early adopters will be showcased also considering potential enablers and barriers in each case study. Factors influencing the value of a service to the end-user, will be discussed with users in a large showcasing event where the final version of the tools will be presented.