Seaming together a patchwork of knowledges: toward co-producing social and behaviourally informed climate services

Recent decades have shown significant advance in weather forecasting; sub-seasonal to seasonal forecast and climate prediction, including advances in a more seamless integration across the spatial and temporal scales of the knowledges these contain. Despite these advances, barriers remain to the uptake of climate services and the realising of their full value proposition. One dimension to overcoming some of the barriers is to recognise that stakeholders and decision makers consider multiple knowledges when taking climate relevant decisions; including their own local knowledges, perceptions and preferences, as well as the knowledges provided by scientific climate data and projections.

In this contribution we present the recently initiated EU-H2020 I-CISK research and innovation project. Through trans-disciplinary research this project aims to develop a co-production framework within which social and behaviourally informed climate services are co-designed, co-created, co-implemented, and co-evaluated with their intended users, as well as with other actors in the climate services value chain, including climate services purveyors, providers and data producers. We present initial results from the project in which multi-actor platforms are established in the seven living labs that are central to our research approach, and the design of the co-production framework. Pre-operational climate services will be co-created in these that showcase the framework in seaming together the patchwork of multiple scientific and local knowledges that meet identified climate information needs across multiple sectors and climate hazards; and that help foster the translation of climate services provided data into actionable information while considering reinforcing and balancing feedback loops associated to users’ decisions.