Ireland’s Route to a permanent National Framework for Climate Services

The establishment of a National Framework for Climate Services in Ireland followed a low risk, yet high impact “project-first” approach to understand the national relevance and appetite for a coordinated approach to climate services. Rather than begin with a National Framework for Climate Services, and be unsure of its interest or value, this “project-first” approach allowed Met Éireann to identify relevant stakeholders, evaluate engagement and discover potential problems. As projects are time bound, this was a low-risk method of determining appetite for a more permanent national solution to provision and sharing of climate information.

Following the publication of the National Adaptation Plan and recommendations from the Irish Climate Change Advisory Council, there was an unprecedented requirement for accessible and robust climate information to support decision making and adaptation planning. At this time the Irish climate services landscape was fragmented and climate information for Ireland was developed in an ad hoc, project-to-project basis. There were no clear mechanisms or structures in place for establishing and maintaining sustainable climate services and partnerships between researchers, providers, policy makers and end users. Met Éireann saw the need for both the development of a common set of climate projections to help Irish society speak the same climate language and the establishment of a permanent national framework for climate services. This led to a national research call (to build national capability), from Met Éireann and in 2021 the TRANSLATE project was founded. TRANSLATE became the seed that led to the establishment of this permanent national framework.

National collaboration, knowledge sharing, and co-production of data and services are central to the TRANSLATE ethos. A key challenge of this project was bringing the whole Irish climate science and services community together and subscribe to a collaborative approach. Rather than work in isolation and leveraging Met Éireann’s position as the National Met Service, an organisation that naturally bridges the science-policy-user interface, Met Éireann brought together the national community – (all of whom would be required under a successful national framework) - under the TRANSLATE banner. This “all-Ireland” approach was so effective that it has led to the establishment of a permanent National Framework for Climate Services.

Here we describe an “all-Government” approach to building permanent mechanisms and structures for developing and maintaining sustainable and scalable climate services and partnerships across the science-policy-user interface by establishing an inclusive National Framework for Climate Services. We explore the challenges, barriers and successes in establishing and operationalising of a National Framework for Climate Services in Ireland.