Looking backwards and looking forwards: outcomes and prospects for the WMO WWRP Value Chain Project

The Value Chain Project is a 4-year initiative under the WMO World Weather Research Programme (WWRP). The Project aims to review value chain practices used to describe and understand weather, warning and climate services; assess and provide guidance on how to effectively apply value chains in a weather warning context involving multiple uses and partnerships; and create a searchable warning database that researchers and practitioners can use to explore the organisation and performance of actual end-to-end warning chains for high impact events, and assess their effectiveness using value chain approaches.  

The anticipated benefits from the project were manifold and included providing National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS) and private weather and climate providers with resources, tools and knowledge to be able to apply the value chain to measure and improve the effectiveness of their early warning systems.  

The value chain concept is useful for understanding the strengths and weakness of existing services, decision making about investment in improvements and the design of new warning systems. The Framework, which is a key output from the project, provides a multi-faceted guide for NMHS in developed and developing countries to combine social and physical sciences to enhance early warning systems.  

The value chain questionnaire, developed as part of the project, allows a forensic end-to-end evaluation of high-impact weather events to assess the performance of warning systems for a specific weather event.  It can be adopted by any NMHS to assess their services, as done by the UK Met Office.  

The growing collection of case studies (that will be stored in an accessible searchable online database) will give visibility to best practice in successful early warning systems and lessons learnt from high impact weather events.  The opportunity for doing cross-case analyses of countries, hazard types and early warning systems will facilitate access to insights on the elements of effective early warning systems in different contexts.  

The project has explored the value chain both as a way of thinking and as a methodology. The collaboration of the 40-member interdisciplinary project team from academia, public and private weather providers across a range of activities has contributed significantly to its impact. The involvement and contribution of this group has extended the reach of the project and created novel learning opportunities and interactions. The resources and tools developed through the project will support more systematic and rigorous decision making and by extension the capacity of NMHS to improve the social and economic value of the services they provide. 

This presentation will summarise the project’s achievements over the past four years and outline ongoing applications of the project’s deliverables.