Over the past decade the development of climate services has grown into a major branch of the atmospheric science and services, and also well beyond these sectoral boundaries. This expansion has been mainly driven by the need for adaptation to climate change, while improved understanding and modelling of the climate system have also helped the development of seasonal and sub-seasonal climate services. Consequently, the expanding climate service market supports decision making in a large variety of user contexts.

The value added of climate services is often assumed to be quite favourable, while actual valuations are currently rare. The uptake of climate services is nevertheless growing slower than expected by actors such as the WMO and the EU, despite the alleged self-evident value added of such services. Several recent EU projects (CLARA, EU-MACS, MARCO, S2S4E etc.) have indicated that the capability to provide an ex-ante estimate of positive net benefits per year would be appreciated by many potential users, and thereby promote uptake of climate services. Similarly, climate service providers and funders, as well as policy makers can benefit from ex-post evaluation and monitoring of the realized economic value attributable to the use of climate services. However, the application of ex-ante and ex-post valuations is not widespread, with notable limitations in systemization and comparability.

So far, the valuation of climate services has been limited by the lack of a universal valuation method. The applicability of methods is context sensitive and heavily affected by data availability. In many cases, methods used for the valuation of weather services or warnings cannot be used to valuate climate services, or need significant adaptation. Furthermore, for many climate services, verification of the beneficial impacts is not possible, or is problematic due to attribution challenges. In principle, methods derived from economics and risk analysis are already available, and although in need of tailoring, they should be applied in climate service valuation.

This session aims to bring together experts in the valuation of climate services and climate service providers that want to integrate ex-ante valuation capability in their service portfolio, and benefit from ex-post valuation for the improvement of existing services and development of new ones. We are looking for a broad spectrum of valuations and presentations that dwell on how ex-ante valuation capability can be integrated into climate service portfolios:
• Ex-ante valuation of climate services (methods and/or applications);
• Ex-post valuation of climate services (methods and/or applications);
• Differences and commonalities in valuation at different aggregation levels (1 actor vs. 1 actor group vs. all users)
• Comparability and portability of valuation results
• Challenges for the uptake of climate services;
• Effects of institutional factors and business models on value creation and appropriation;
• Any other related topic.