Climateurope2 is a 4.5-year Horizon Europe funded project that addresses the need for timely delivery and effective use of climate information
The project aims to support the climate services community and propose standardization procedures for future equitable and quality-assured climate services, which will be useful for decision-making in all sectors of society.
The project started in September 2022. The Climateurope2 consortium, coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, consists of 33 parties (29 beneficiaries, 1 affiliated entity, and 3 associated partners) from 13 countries, covering a wide spectrum of expertise (see Figure 1).
Background and objectives for Climateurope2
Timely delivery and effective use of climate information are fundamental for a green recovery and a resilient, climate-neutral Europe in response to climate change and variability. Climate services address this by providing climate information for use in decision-making to manage risks and realise opportunities.
The market and need for climate information have seen impressive progress in recent years and are expected to grow in the foreseeable future. However, the communities involved in the development and provision of climate services are often unaware of each other and lack interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary knowledge.
In addition, quality assurance, relevant standards, and other forms of assurance (such as guidelines and good practices) for climate services are lagging. These are needed to ensure the saliency, credibility, legitimacy, and authoritativeness of climate services, and they build two-way trust between supply and demand.
Climateurope2 aims to develop future equitable and quality-assured climate services to all sectors of society by:
- Developing standardisation procedures for climate services
- Supporting an equitable European climate services community
- Enhancing the uptake of quality-assured climate services to support adaptation and mitigation to climate change
The project will identify the support and standardisation needs of climate services, including criteria for certification and labelling, as well as the user-driven criteria needed to support climate action. This information will be used to propose a taxonomy of climate services, suggest community-based good practices and guidelines, and propose standards where possible. A large variety of activities to support the communities involved in European climate services will also be organised.
Role of GERICS in Climateurope2
The Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS), as part of the Helmholtz Zentrum HEREON, is involved in several work packages (WPs) of the Climateurope2 project. Main contributions are being made to the WPs on Business Innovation and Market Development.
- What are the criteria and indicators of (high)-quality climate services?
- How can guidelines and standards help to increase quality but also transparency and trust of climate services?
These are some questions addressed by GERICS within the Climateurope2 project. After an initial stocktake of the scientific literature, the quality aspects are further investigated by case studies, surveys, interviews, and community engagement to prioritize elements guiding high-quality climate services. The analysis encompasses all components of climate services, such as the decision-making context, the ecosystem of actors and co-production processes, the knowledge systems, information and processes and the delivery mode and evaluation.
Developing standardization processes
The results from the Climateurope2 project will be used to develop standardization procedures, such as the initiative to develop a new European standard for climate services, which was initiated by the European Commission at the end of 2023 as part of the Green Deal.
The European Committee for Standardization organization, CEN (Comité Européen der Normalisation), established in 2021 the Technical Committee for standardisation CEN/TC 467 ‘Climate Change’. The CEN/TC 467 ‘Climate Change’ addresses requests about standardization activities towards the topic of mitigation and adaptation to climate change. The planned development of a European standard for climate service will be prepared and organized within the committee.
GERICS: Continued work to help the climate
GERICS has been engaged in relevant national and international standardization committees for the development and maintenance of standards for adaptation to climate change for many years; therefore, results from the Climateurope2 project can be directly fed into such standardization activities.
The ultimate goal of the activities within Climateurope2 is to enhance the quality of climate services. Higher transparency and greater trust in climate services will enhance the value and impact of applying climate-related information for adaptation to climate change.
