How do we measure the impact of a Climate Service? Lessons learned from Klimaatlas, the Danish National Climate Atlas

Climate services typically provide information with the goal of supporting climate adaptation at the local level: a successful climate service is therefore one that has impact on society and that is used to make decisions. While quantifying this impact is essential for ensuring the continued relevance of the service and for justifying continued funding, it is not clear how best this should be done. For example, standard metrics used within academia, such as the number of citations a paper or dataset receives, are not relevant, as most users of a climate service are not engaged in the publication of manuscripts. Similarly, standard web-oriented metrics such as number of page views do not reflect how the data is actually used to make decisions, and their representativeness of impact is often clouded by GDPR and privacy requirements. Here we describe our attempts to quantify the societal impact of Klimaatlas, the Danish National Climate Atlas. We centre our work around an analysis of the DK2020 climate action plans prepared by all 98 municipalities in Denmark, focussing on cases both where Klimaatlas has been used extensively and where it has not been used at all to understand the reasons for these outcomes. We also analyse the results of a user satisfaction survey and follow up interviews to get a better understanding of how Klimaatlas is used. The work shows that over 90% of all municipalities in Denmark use Klimaatlas to some degree. The impact analysis also revealed uses of Klimaatlas in other layers of government, in education, literature and private industry, many of which we were previously unaware of. Here we will focus on the lessons learnt from this exercise, and in particular on the need to think impact assessments directly into the design of climate services from the very start. Clearly expressed requirements for how to cite the data can also aid impact tracking, as well as privacy-compliant mechanisms to track usage and the use of standard identifiers such DOIs.