Generating Actionable Climate Information in Support of Climate Adaptation and Mitigation

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Background

Climate change is under way in full extent, adversely affecting more and more facets in nature, society and economy. The observations and the projections of these changes are increasingly important to consider in long-term planning, given the need to adapt to the multi-sectoral climate impacts that can be anticipated. In most cases, it is the information on the local scale in a user-oriented way that is most relevant in this context. Over recent years, many countries and organisations have set up climate services such as factsheets, brochures, web-tools, data to enable downstream applications and to form a decision support basis for climate action planning (e.g., KNMI14 in the Netherlands, UKCP18 in the UK, CH2018 in Switzerland, ‘Climate Change in Australia’, NCA4 in the US, Copernicus Climate Data Store / C3S).

The extent and setup of the value chain in the processing from pure climate data (e.g. climate observations and climate model projections) down to user-specific climate impact indicators differs from country to country. This includes for instance, the overall goals and drivers of the initiative, the underlying scientific approach in the process chain, specific choices made during the workflow, how user needs are integrated, how the governance is structured under institutional and political boundary conditions, the way how results are distributed and communicated and how they feedback on the re-adjustment of the process chain. It is the aim of this Research Topic to foster the international exchange on these issues and identify the country-specific lessons learnt in producing user-tailored and actionable climate information in support of climate adaptation and mitigation and its uptake in downstream applications. This exchange may contribute to guidelines and/or best practices in the production of climate services that are to date missing on an international level.
It is also the aim of the Research Topic to reflect on future challenges, sustainability and exchange long-term strategies to establish national climate services as a natural source of consultation for decision-making as it is currently the case with weather forecasts.

This Research Topic hence focuses on reflections on the generation of climate information and services in support of climate action planning. Specifically, contributions to the following topics are welcomed:
· Practical challenges and best practices in developing national climate scenarios and climate impact assessments to support adaptation action.
· Reflections on the value chain: underpinning science to extract relevant and robust information, challenges in tailoring information for risk assessments and as decision support, challenges in the integration of user-needs and co-production and communication strategies to convey information in a user-tailored fashion.
· Mechanisms and structures to establish and maintain the process of regularly providing climate services in support of climate adaptation and mitigation.
· Overview of differences between countries and analysis why certain approaches did or did not work in other countries.
· User uptake on the overall cycle of producing climate scenarios on a regular interval: how is the added value perceived and what is the added value of this climate information against other context information to take climate action?

Keywords: Climate adaptation, climate mitigation, climate services, climate observations, climate model projections, user needs, national climate services, national climate scenarios, impact assessments

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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