A reflection on climate services co-created across seven diverse contexts

Co-creation of climate services is increasingly recognised as important to effective uptake and use. Stages of co-creation include co-exploring climate information needs of users and how decisions are informed by both local and scientific knowledges, and co-designing climate services to meet needs through integrating local knowledges and tailored state-of-the-art scientific weather and climate data. Such integration of scientific and local knowledges was one of the foundations of the human-centred approach taken to co-creating climate services in the recently finalised I-CISK research project, supported by the European Union H2020 programme. Central to the project were seven living labs working with a broad range of stakeholders at the local scale and across different climates and contexts. Six of these living labs are found in Europe, including in Spain, Italy, Greece, Hungary, Netherlands, Georgia, while one living lab was established in Lesotho in Southern Africa. In each of these, and over the duration of the project, a range of pre-operational climate services was co-created following a carefully designed engagement strategy. Despite a common co-creation framework being followed, and the climate services that were developed being founded on a common cloud-based platform, the outcome of the process in each of the living labs varied considerably. Clearly this variability can be attributed to the different users, sectors, local contexts and climates of each of these living labs. However, several other factors should also be recognised. These include externalities such as the broader institutional readiness and maturity of the climate services ecosystem but also internalities to the project such as the constitution and disciplinary skills and interests of the teams interacting with actors in each of the living labs. In this contribution we reflect on the diversity of the pre-operational climate services co-created in the project and discuss the factors that may have contributed to this diversity. We also explore how these may influence the degree to which identified needs of actors in each of the living labs are met, as well as the sustainability and pathways to operational climate services that are not just useful, but that are also used.