Cultivating Climate Services: User Engagement and Governance Insights from the Tea Sector in the UK and China

Tea is an important global commodity, with major growing regions across Asia, Africa and South America, alongside emerging small‑scale and artisanal production in the UK and Europe. Within all of these contexts, both the quality and quantity of tea production are highly sensitive to climate variability and change, operating across weather, seasonal and longer‑term timescales, with wide‑ranging implications for livelihoods, economies and food systems. For climate information to be genuinely actionable, it must be closely aligned with the needs and decision‑making contexts of those who will ultimately use it. Meaningful user engagement is therefore central to the development of effective climate services. Within the Tea‑CUP (Co-developing Useful Predictions) activity, one key mechanism for achieving this has been the development of agricultural decision‑making calendars with tea growers. These calendars act as structured engagement tools that support dialogue, knowledge exchange and trust‑building between scientists, growers and wider supply‑chain stakeholders. The calendars capture growers’ decision‑making processes across varying timescales, explicitly linking routine management activities with key climate hazards, associated risks and adaptation measures that are either already in place or under consideration. This approach has been trialled with UK tea growers and most recently collaboration has begun with stakeholders in China. Crucially, working together to build the calendars not only enables mutual learning but also ensures that discussions are shaped by growers' own lived experience. Tea-CUP adopts a co-production approach that places sustained engagement and decision making at its core, illustrating how inclusive engagement and international collaboration can help translate climate science into practical, user centred services for both established and emerging tea growing regions.