Identifying climate information services users and their needs in Sub-Saharan Africa: a review and learning agenda

Web Editor — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 15:40:13 +0000

Climate information services (CIS) involve the production, translation, transfer, and use of climate information for individual and societal decision-making. After years of focus on building CIS around available information, today the CIS community recognizes that effective CIS are aimed at specific users of the service and their particular needs. In this review, we describe practical experiences identifying CIS users and their needs, showing different approaches, assumptions, and levels of empirical support. Our uneven and limited understanding of users and their needs presents four key challenges for climate services: (1) designing effective assessments of users and their needs, (2) identifying and overcoming barriers to CIS use, (3) scaling up a CIS and (4) the cross-cutting challenge of dealing with changing conditions and changing user knowledge. Reviewing project and academic literature on CIS in sub-Saharan Africa, we assess what is known and not known relating to these challenges. We prioritize identified gaps in knowledge into a learning agenda to organize learning from practice and research such that both serve a range of needs for knowledge about users and their needs, speak to current ‘good practices’ in CIS design, management, and evaluation, and point the way to better practices in the future.

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Climate services for society: origins, institutional arrangements, and design elements for an evaluation framework

Web Editor — Mon, 30 Jan 2023 08:55:03 +0000

Climate services involve the generation, provision, and contextualization of information and knowledge derived from climate research for decision-making at all levels of society. These services are mainly targeted at informing adaptation to climate variability and change, widely recognized as an important challenge for sustainable development.

This paper reviews the development of climate services, beginning with a historical overview, a short summary of improvements in climate information, and a description of the recent surge of interest in climate service development including, for example, the Global Framework for Climate Services, implemented by the World Meteorological Organization in October 2012.

It also reviews institutional arrangements of selected emerging climate services across local, national, regional, and international scales. By synthesizing existing literature, the paper proposes four design elements of a climate services evaluation framework. These design elements include: problem identification and the decision-making context; the characteristics, tailoring, and dissemination of the climate information; the governance and structure of the service, including the process by which it is developed; and the socioeconomic value of the service. The design elements are intended to serve as a guide to organize future work regarding the evaluation of when and whether climate services are more or less successful. The paper concludes by identifying future research questions regarding the institutional arrangements that support climate services and nascent efforts to evaluate them.

The post Climate services for society: origins, institutional arrangements, and design elements for an evaluation framework appeared first on climateservices.it CNR-IBE.

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Identifying climate information services users and their needs in Sub-Saharan Africa: a review and learning agenda

Climate services for society: origins, institutional arrangements, and design elements for an evaluation framework