Beyond information gaps: reframing climate service needs through a knowledge management and decision-making perspective in Eastern Georgia

Climate service development invariably begins with the question of user needs: how to identify, understand, and respond to them. Conventional needs assessments tend to surface discrete gaps in data, information, or technology, pushing development toward data-driven solutions. While improvements in data quality and quantity are necessary, research has consistently shown that they cannot alone guarantee uptake. A crucial gap persists whereby conventional approaches reveal what information is needed, but not the context in which those needs exist, how knowledge flows between actors, what constrains its use, or how decisions are actually made. This overemphasis on information gaps risks producing climate services that are technically sound but poorly aligned with local realities.

We address this by reframing climate service needs through a knowledge management and decision-making lens to obtain a more nuanced understanding of needs and the landscape of climate service provision in Georgia (Alazani River Basin). This research was carried out as part of the EU Horizon 2020 I-CISK (Innovating Climate Services through Integrating Scientific and local Knowledge) project, which aimed at co-creating pre-operational climate services with a multisectoral stakeholder group. Our approach involved mapping key actors forming a viable climate service value chain, and through key informant interviews and participatory approaches such as decision timelines, examining how knowledge is created, shared, and managed across providers, purveyors, and end users, and how decision-making processes draw on local and scientific knowledge.

Our findings reveal dynamics a conventional needs assessment would unlikely surface. Climate services remain nascent in Georgia, with a fragmented institutional landscape; however, opportunities for development exist. Providers and purveyors recognise the importance of climate information and the complementarity of their roles and mandates, yet inter-institutional knowledge exchange is limited and dependent on external interventions such as donor-funded projects, creating a structural bottleneck to sustained knowledge integration. End users, particularly farmers, demonstrate strong awareness of climate change impacts through observed shifts in seasonal patterns and farming conditions. They rely primarily on their local knowledge and social networks, supplemented by smartphone-based forecasts for short-term tactical decisions. Engagement with longer-term climate information remains limited due to concerns around credibility, salience, and legitimacy.

Taken together, these findings provide a more complete picture of the climate service provision landscape in Georgia, revealing not just what information is missing, but surfacing deeper issues around knowledge integration, institutional collaboration, and the usefulness of scientific information - areas that co-creation processes are well placed to address.