Narrowing the gap between climate services and adaptation to sea-level rise: perspective of local state authorities in France

Coastal climate services to support adaptation to sea level rise are developing rapidly in Europe. However, they remain widely underused today, primarily due to the persistent gap between the information provided and the decision-making contexts of stakeholders. This is despite significant co-production efforts between involved scientists and occasional voluntary users.

Here, we propose a new perspective targeting local state services in France. These services play a key role in major public decision planning at local scale in several countries. Nevertheless, their perception of effective adaptation to sea-level rise, as well as their climate information needs to support local authorities in adequately planning territorial development, remain unclear.

In this study, we therefore (1) systematically explore what kind of information local French state services need to plan sea level rise adaptation and (2) compare these needs with the information currently available through emerging European broadscale climate services. Using exploratory interviews and an online survey, we produced a national map of the perception of adaptation by local state services. Our findings indicate that most local authorities are still in an assessment phase, with only a few implementing adaptation measures that go beyond the mainstream coastal defence and dyke management.

In many regions, local state services consider sea level rise scenario by 2100 that are higher than national risk legislation requirement, and closer to the state-of-art academic knowledge. Climate information represents only a small part of their overall needs, which are mainly turned toward legal expertise, shared experiences, clarification of national rules, land acquisition strategy, financing, or planning tools. Legitimate standardised sea-level rise information deployed nationally are nevertheless considered useful to focus local discussions on effective action. Furthermore, although the European Coastal Climate Core services (CoCliCo) cannot be used easily by our stakeholders, our results reveal untapped potential: with additional work, including layout, these datasets enable regional comparisons, giving useful rough estimates, and may help to prioritise local government actions, and schedule in time and space their response.

To reach their goals and be used widely, climate services must be developed strategically, focusing on knowledge brokers such as local state services whose changing practices, for example through the co-production process, will affect a large population.