From the 27th to the 30th of May 2024, the Workshop on Climate Prediction and Services over the Atlantic-Arctic region took place in Bergen, Norway. It gathered more than a hundred researchers to discuss the science of climate prediction and services. This workshop was an initiative of the Trond Mohn Research Foundation-funded project, Bjerknes Climate Prediction Unit, and was strongly supported by other collaborating projects.

On the third day of the workshop, Asun Lera St.Clair, a partner of the Climateurope2 project, took the opportunity to address the expert audience with a keynote speech on "The next steps for climate services". Asun is a philosopher and sociologist, the Climate Change Lead at DNV Group Research and Development, and a leading researcher at the Earth Sciences Department of the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre (BSC).

During her presentation, Asun outlined the four key next steps for climate services: establishing the boundaries of climate services; building a complete, diverse and coherent scientific community; widening the climate services community; and building adequate governance mechanisms. She began by introducing the climate services components identified by the project as a first step towards defining the currently fuzzy boundaries of climate services, which will help identifying what constitutes a quality-assured and equitable climate service.

Climate services components defined by Climateurope2.

Following this, Asun discussed the need to open up the climate services community to other key actors, such as the innovation and industrial research industry, and highlighted the need to rethink the role of the scientific community.

“We need to thoroughly think of what institutional mechanisms we need. We need institutions such as boundary organisations that act as translators, that are able to reach out to scientists while possessing a deep understanding of the decision-making context of specific sectors.”

These initial actions will lead to the final step of establishing norms and standardisation of climate services and their components. She introduced a framework to support the equitable standardisation of climate services, developed within Climateurope2. This is the first framework designed to provide a path for developing standards, quality management, and assurance for climate services. The framework is based on a broad understanding of standards and standardisation processes across different fields, and it recognises climate services as complex and intersecting combinations of data, products, processes, knowledge systems, and stakeholders, including their social and human dimensions.

You can see here Asun’s presentation at the workshop: