What is Climateurope2 about?

Climateurope2 is a project coordinated by the Barcelona Supercomputing Center that works to develop standardisation procedures and recommendations for climate services, while supporting and bringing together the European climate services community. In addition, the project strives to enhance the uptake of quality-assured climate services to support adaptation and mitigation to climate change and variability. This will underpin the leading role of Europe when it comes to the production of trustworthy, user-relevant knowledge to manage climate risks and enhance adaptive capacities, while benefiting climate services at the global scale.

The project will initially 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. Using approaches from social sciences and humanities, as well as extensive technical expertise, a community of practice will be built for this standardisation through the Climateurope2 platform.

Furthermore, co-production and stakeholder engagement in climate services will be addressed through the creation of a network of different European climate services actors. A large variety of interactive and innovative activities will be organised to support this community, such as festivals, webstivals, art installations and roadshows. This will help engage with not only the communities involved in the development of climate services, but also those not familiar with these services, particularly those in the policy and business domains, as well as underrepresented groups and disciplines.

Background

Climate information plays a fundamental role in achieving a green recovery and climate neutrality in Europe, and a central one for a climate-resilient Europe. However, climate information should be delivered appropriately and used effectively in order to be integrated into decision making processes to better manage risks and realise opportunities. This can be achieved with climate services, understood as the provision of climate information for use in decision making.

The market and needs for climate information have seen impressive progress in recent years, and are expected to grow in the foreseeable future. As the number and diversity of actors that make up the landscape of climate services keeps growing and continuously evolving, new challenges appear. 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 behind. 

Building on the existing networks and work of the earlier EU project Climateurope, as well as other past and present initiatives, Climateurope2 works to support and standardise climate services, in order to ensure their saliency, credibility, legitimacy and authoritativeness, and build two-way trust between supply and demand.