A framework for standardising climate services: advances and challenges

The rapidly increasing demand for usable, credible and legitimate climate services, driven partly by the European Union’s (EU) commitment to building a resilient Europe (see e.g. EU commission doc no. 16856/25) is coinciding with the European Union’s “New approach to enable global leadership of EU standards promoting values and a resilient, green and digital Single Market” (2022). This “New approach” prompted a standardisation request on climate services to the European standardisation body CEN/CENELEC on the part of the EU commission (C(2025)6809 – Standardisation request M/617) which was adopted on 15 October 2025. 

While this policy context already specifies a particular path to standardisation, it still raises several epistemological and social questions for how and what should be standardised in climate services. First of all, standardisation is a social process that, especially when developed through formal channels such as CEN/CENELEC, is based on a consensus of experts that create harmonization through guidelines and rules. This is a form of knowledge governance that requires considerations about who counts as an expert and how consensus should be achieved, raising issues about the equitability of standardisation. Second, the requirements and recommendations of standards aim at promoting the comparability and reproducibility of a service, which raises technical and economic considerations in a market that is currently composed of both governmental and private climate service providers, which operate

In this contribution, we describe how the considerations above materialize in our work in Climateurope2, a Horizon Europe coordination and support action which, amongst other things, aims at supporting the equitable standardisation of climate services. The analytical approach to supporting standardisation developed by the project involves dividing climate services into four components: the context in which the service is developed and of the decision space it supports, the knowledge systems that are included in the service development and provision, the ecosystem of actors involved in the service, and finally the delivery mode and evaluation of the service. The project has also developed a framework for supporting standardisation which guides the analysis of each service component through an identification of existing tools of governance, an analysis of existing standards, the identification of pros and cons of standardisation and key questions to support the standardisation process itself. 

After describing analytical questions raised by the framework for the different components of climate services, we focus on the possible differences that answers to these questions raise for knowledge governance through standardisation and standards for public climate service providers, such as national hydrological and meteorological services, and private providers. These two different groups are characterized by different funding structures and different economic motivations and therefore different social dynamics. In particular, there are differences in considerations about equitability, transparency, and benefits and drawbacks of standardisation that the framework raises for these different groups. While this analysis is currently still in progress, these open considerations need to be addressed by the climate services community at large to achieve the EU’s goals of its “New approach”.