The Swiss National Centre for Climate Services (NCCS) – accomplishments and future perspectives

In response to the Global Framework for Climate Services’ (GFCS) call for the establishment of national coordination mechanisms, Switzerland founded its National Centre for Climate Services (NCCS) in late 2015. The Centre is organized as a network of nine Federal Offices and Institutes as well as partners from academia. Based on a federally agreed national adaptation strategy and plan for action, the NCCS is organized in the sense of a nationwide network. All members are on a par and have an equal say. Attention is given to both pure climate information as well as downstream applications along the climate services value chain.

The NCCS pursues three main goals: 1) bundle the existing climate services of the Swiss Confederation, 2) foster dialogue among stakeholder communities, and 3) co-produce new tailored solutions. The co-creation and dissemination of climate services is vital for effective climate mitigation, adaptation and societal transformation. Thus, the NCCS supports policymakers from the national to local level as well as the private sector and society at large in minimizing their risks, maximizing opportunities and optimizing costs.

Since its foundation in 2015, several accomplishments have been made through the NCCS’ priority themes, such as the release of the Swiss climate scenarios (CH2018) in 2018 and hydrological scenarios (Hydro-CH2018) in 2021 as a downstream application. Other accomplishments include novel insights into climate-sensitive disaster risk reduction as well as the elaboration of a new hail climatology serving multiple stakeholders in the insurance sector. Moreover, the NCCS web portal www.nccs.ch has been online for more than two years, serving as a one stop-shop for the provision of tailored climate services, best practices and guidance.

This presentation will give an overview of the NCCS and its first milestones as well as discuss lessons learnt and current challenges. This also includes new perspectives from a new NCCS programme on cross-sectoral climate impacts and the development of respective decision-support tools to be launched in 2021.