Keywords

1 Introduction

Climate services aid the effective use of climate information by individuals, businesses, government and other organisations. They are increasingly used due to growing public and political awareness of the need to take action to adapt to climate change [1].

Global, regional and national efforts are under way to facilitate the development and uptake of climate services, such as the Global Framework for Climate Services (https://gfcs.wmo.int/), the European Roadmap on Climate Services [2] and the UK Climate Resilience Programme (UKCR).

This paper provides an overview of the projects UKCR delivered, touches on the challenges they faced and the successes experienced, and highlights lessons that have been learned along the way.

2 Overview of Projects

Fifteen climate services projects were commissioned through UKCR, with half focussed on prototyping and the other half on improving other aspects of climate service delivery (e.g. developing standards and approaches to valuing services).

Prototypes were trialled in a range of contexts, exploring new research and new markets, as well as working with established users to address known challenges. A large proportion of the projects commissioned focused on providing climate information to the water sector (mature and heavily regulated), as well as the urban sector (emerging).

Table 1 provides an overview of the projects. Project outcomes (i.e. how the services are used) are more difficult to articulate due to the time lag between service delivery and impact, the inability of the userFootnote 1 to articulate the impact, or an unwillingness/inability of the user to share this information. However, the expectation is that the outputs will be helpful to users in some way, such as informing policy development, changing management practices, raising awareness, or providing new guidance, workflows or evidence base.

Table 1 Climate services projects commissioned by the UK Climate Resilience Programme. We define ‘applied research’ as capability-led development with subsequent user engagement, ‘prototype development’ as exploratory work to develop new products for new markets, ‘product development’ as the creation of new products in response to clear user needs, and ‘delivery’ as being additional activities to support the development and delivery of climate services. We define sector maturity as: low (no regulation), medium (regulation but minimal engagement), or high (active engagement with regulation)
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3 Key Learnings

To gather insights into the projects outlined in Table 1, we conducted one-hour, semi-structured interviews with representatives from each of the project teams (25 April–31 May 2022). We took notes, identifying key topics arising from the interviews. These topics were then compared and themes identified through discussion. Due to time constraints, we were not able to engage beyond service providers. While most project leads had a good understanding of their users, it would have been insightful to obtain a user voice directly. This might have highlighted issues with usability that were not fully appreciated by the service provider.

Common themes emerged from our research, which we have categorised as follows: enabling environment, user trust, and scalability. The key learnings relating to these three topics are discussed below.

3.1 Enabling Environment

This theme refers to the environment in which a prototype is being developed — does it help or hinder the prototyping process? During our discussions, it became apparent that this is a critical aspect, which consists of (1) the provider organisation, (2) the user organisation and (3) the wider context (political, economic, social, cultural or legal) in which the prototype is being developed. This relationship is shown in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1
An illustration has 3 elements. Provider, wider context, and user are aligned horizontally from left to right in order. An arrow each points from provider to user and vice-versa.

The enabling environment in which a prototype is being developed affects its development and delivery. Conditions within the provider organisation, the user organisation and the wider context in which they operate all need to incentivise climate service delivery

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3.1.1 Provider Organisations

The following key learnings emerged on how the focus, expertise and organisational structure of service providers affect climate service development:

  • Definition of success: Typical metrics of ‘success’ within many organisations (e.g. publications, sales, downloads) are not appropriate for incentivising climate services development. This is because they bear no relation to whether a service is used or even beneficial to the intended user. This disconnect made it difficult to understand the impact of a service on users and to monitor and evaluate success. Consideration is needed to define and measure success within service providers.

  • Skills: Many climate service providers have a background in research; therefore, staff are experienced in delivering peer-reviewed journal articles, datasets and reports. However, staff may be less experienced in user engagement and service development; they, therefore, may have more limited knowledge regarding establishing user needs, communicating science and supplier capabilities, and delivering actionable services. As usability, usefulness and utility often drive the uptake and value of services, service providers would benefit from recognising and valuing the skills needed to facilitate these attributes. Similarly, the skillset required to co-develop with users tends to be under-appreciated in projects, yet critical for success. See Chapter 3 for further details on the need for (and challenges of) co-developing climate services.

3.1.2 User Organisations

The following key learnings emerged on how aspects within the user organisation can influence service development. It should be noted that these were drawn from conversations with the project leads (not end users).

  • Relationship: The relationship between the service provider and the user organisation is an important element in service development [3]. Those we spoke with indicated that co-development tended to be more effective when a principal contact stayed in post and engaged throughout. Progress increased when the principal contact had the remit, time and willingness to engage with both the service provider and internally within the user organisation. Funding and project planning tends to focus on the climate service provider rather than the user; the time and effort required from the user organisation is often overlooked, or resources are assumed (e.g. time, energy, knowledge, funding).

  • Sector: The nature of the sector is important. A highly competitive and more regulated market appears to result in users being more receptive to engaging with climate services. This was evident in the water sector, where users were willing to engage with UKCR projects—either for competitive advantage or for fear of being left behind. In a heavily regulated sector such as this, there is a clearer pathway to align climate service provision with existing regulation (see ‘Wider context’ section below).

3.1.3 Wider Context

The following key learnings emerged on how the wider political, economic, social, cultural or legal context affects the ability of service providers and user organisations to engage with climate services.

  1. 1.

    Funding landscape: Many of the funded projects were well defined from the start as they built on previous working relationships and projects. This is likely a direct result of the nature of the funding calls: limited funding and project duration meant successful proposals tended to have a clear scope and corresponding benefit. These external pressures disincentivise expansion into new users or sectors, as it takes time to develop relationships and understand end-user requirements. We recognise that funding bodies are required to demonstrate impact and therefore need to be confident that a project will deliver; but this pressure to achieve tangible impact within a limited timeframe appears to deter the development of services for new sectors.

    Similarly, many of the barriers to service provision partly stem from the approach used to commission the work, typically focussing on asking the service provider to consider what capability could be developed to meet a customer need rather than taking a genuinely user-centric approach. Also, the difficulty in so many projects articulating outcomes may be a function of the commissioning process as documenting outcomes was not built into project design. Many side benefits (e.g. network/relationship development) were cited as outcomes but not recorded as part of the project documentation.

  2. 2.

    Regulation: Regulation can drive action (see section on ‘User organisations’ above). This is because users are clear of the minimum requirement placed upon them, and service providers have a clear steer as to what information is required. By extension, regulatory requirements to undertake climate action could facilitate climate service uptake, whereby suppliers understand information need and users are provided with the remit to engage with suppliers. For example, reporting required as mandated by the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures (https://www.fsb-tcfd.org/) (TCFD) and the Climate Change Act 2008 provides a helpful enabling environment.

3.2 User Trust

Projects employed a variety of approaches to build relationships with users. User trust in a service output is critical. Building relationships with users and involving them in service development are well-established approaches, as is clear communication about service scope and limitations, being careful not to over-sell current or future service provision.

Many of the projects were built on pre-existing relationships, which meant that the co-development process could start swiftly. Interactions between service providers and users varied considerably, in terms of the platform (e.g. emails, WhatsApp, workshops, events, one-to-one meetings) and frequency (e.g. ad-hoc, weekly, quarterly). While the COVID-19 pandemic was cited as having a negative impact on engagement (e.g. staff shortages), there were also several positive reflections, such as greater familiarity with remote working and collaboration.

The timing of user engagement also varied. Some advocated for engagement from project inception, while others saw value in developing a demonstrator before initiating engagement. In the case of the latter, the provider organisations had a good appreciation of user need, so were less likely to take a fundamentally wrong development path. However, while there are benefits to focussing discussions on a tangible product, it runs the risk of making incorrect assumptions about users’ needs or constraining their thinking.

3.3 Scalability

Developing new services is often best done in a focussed ‘bespoke’ way through engaging with a limited set of users. This is often followed by an aspiration to reach a wider audience by rolling out similar services to a wider set of users. This concept of delivering climate services at scale was raised in many of the interviews and represents a challenge within the climate service community [4].

While the ‘create once, use many’ approach might be cost-effective from a delivery perspective, evidence pointed to the following potential drawbacks:

  1. 1.

    Evidence suggests that climate services created without significant user input are used less and potentially misused; therefore, ‘scaling’ may represent a false economy.

  2. 2.

    To enhance the usability of the climate services, it was reported that language used within the products should align with language used by users and outputs should align with existing metrics.

  3. 3.

    In many cases, it was also reported that generic outputs are ineffective; they fail to provide enough information for those seeking more technical detail, while also failing to be accessible for those seeking a more top-level summary.

The interview insights raise questions about how to feasibly scale climate services, given the need for bespoke outputs. We reflect on the implications of this and other insights in the next section.

4 Implications for Future Climate Services Landscape

The three key themes—enabling environment, user trust, scalability—emerging from our interviews are connected, as there is a clear link between the importance of the enabling environment in increasing user engagement and trust. In turn, both themes have implications for scalability, as bespoke services are more likely to be trusted and used. Based on our findings, we propose a series of recommendations on how to incentivise and scale up climate services.

4.1 Incentivisation

The following recommendations are characterised by stakeholder type.

4.1.1 Service Providers

Service providers should produce outputs that are useful and usable to end users. The following internal mechanisms can be used to facilitate this aim: (1) focus the underpinning scientific work on problems that users need to have addressed; and (2) recognise and reward the work required to make useful and usable climate services, as career paths for these individuals are not as defined as for climate scientists (i.e., publishing articles) or operational meteorologists (i.e., accreditation) (https://www.rmets.org/professional-development).

For (1), lessons could be learnd from the private sector where the funding model is directly related to user satisfaction. For (2), greater external professional recognition of the skills required to co-develop, deliver and support climate services (e.g. through chartership) would be beneficial.

4.1.2 Users

Users should implement ways to work across institutional silos and to embed climate adaptation and resilience into decision-making. There is a role for ‘knowledge translators’ in bridging silos within and between organisations, which is increasingly recognised in both the public and private sectors.

4.1.3 Context (Regulators)

Regulation, whether from government, industry bodies or international organisations, promotes user engagement with climate services. A key question is how to encourage the benefits of regulation into other sectors. Potential mechanisms include moving towards net zero, stress testing and resilience building, climate exposure reporting (i.e. TCFD) and expansion of the Climate Change Act 2008’s Adaptation Reporting Power (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/182636/report-faq-110126.pdf) to other organisations such as local authorities.

4.2 Context (Funders)

Through certain projects, UKCR intended to facilitate the co-development of climate services, building on climate research. Recommendations for future programmes of this nature would be to consider following a value stream approach that starts with the user. This would ensure a better linkage between the user and capability development, resulting in a clearer understanding of the overall impact of the programme. We see two priority areas for primary research: (1) developing scientific approaches that provide robust evidence at the level of decision support required by users (see Chapter 8 for further discussion); and (2) focussing on systems, so that interdependencies between sectors and/or risks are captured.

4.3 Scaling up

In this final section, we focus our recommendations on service providers and those within the wider context (note: users are not a key barrier in this regard).

4.3.1 Service Providers

Several projects published data, reports and code in the public domain. While this may seem a transparent and traditional way to share knowledge, there are potential problems, as existing users may not have the technical skills to use the information and new users may not know where to find it. A support system should be put in place to ensure that outputs are not misused, and feedback loops established to shape future development by providers. For services to endure in a meaningful way, it is necessary to consider the business model once the project completes and funding ends—as mandated by the UKSA International Partnership Programme (https://www.spacefordevelopment.org/ipp/), for example.

4.3.2 Context (Funders)

There is a clear need to reach users across a wide range of sectors. However, it takes time to develop new relationships, to understand their needs and to develop the science and services to meet those needs. Current funding approaches tend to require certainty and demonstrable value for money at the proposal stage, whereas it would be helpful to have more of a staged approach to encourage working with new sectors. Directing funding towards the following activities would particularly help to progress service development: (1) improve our understanding of what happens with existing services, to learn how stakeholders use the services and how their needs evolve; (2) consider how existing work could be repurposed or extended to new use cases; and (3) take the next steps towards ‘operationalising’ services at scale.

5 Conclusions

UKCR made significant progress in furthering the use of climate services in the UK, by working with new user groups, creating new methodologies to enhance climate service delivery, piloting products and developing guidance and resources to support climate service delivery. Barriers remain, however, notably surrounding the development and delivery of climate services. The effectiveness of this process depends on the enabling conditions—the actions of regulators, funders and government (the wider context) ultimately influence the actions of service providers and users. To progress climate services, attention should, therefore, focus on fostering the necessary enabling conditions in these groups.