| Climate Services for Development Planning and Implementation: A Framework for Assessing and Valuing Climate Services
Anderson, Glen D.
While weather forecasting products have been available globally for decades, the full suite of climate services – including historical and real time observational meteorological data, daily, weekly, and seasonal forecasts, and longer-term climate projections – has only been under development in the last 15 to 20 years. Climate services have been developed and implemented quite quickly in developed countries for public and private sector users. However, diffusion of these tools in developing countries has been slower for several reasons related to 1) lack of awareness of the opportunities and benefits of climate services; 2) spotty record of managing local weather and climate data; and 3) limited resources to build and sustain capacity in providing climate services.
The Climate Services Partnership (CSP) was formed during the International Conference on Climate Services (ICCS) in October 2011. The CSP seeks to improve the provision and development of climate services worldwide. During the ICCS, three working groups were formed to carry out the work program of the CSP leading up to the second ICCS in Berlin in September 2012. The Economic Valuation of Climate Services Working Group, chaired by John Zillman and myself, is collaborating on several activities to demonstrate the benefits of climate services and help providers prioritize opportunities for expanding the use of climate services.
The proposed paper will provide an overview of the Working Group’s activities leading up to the next ICCS and describe specific work that is underway and expected to be completed prior to the EGU meetings. The focal point of the Working Group’s activities is the development of matrix to help identify and value the best opportunities for using climate services. Different categories of climate services will be listed in rows and potential users of climate services arrayed in columns. The Working Group is meeting at the American Meteorological Society meetings in January to finalize the matrix and carry out the following analyses:
1) Working Group members in attendance will offer their views on the potential application of climate services for each user group. For simplicity, each cell of the matrix will be assigned a value of “high”, “medium”, or “low” importance. This will be a starting point and follow-up steps are planned to refine these rankings.
2) The second step will be to review the list of climate services projects and applications (approximately 100) that was developed by the Developing Country Task Team that met in conjunction with the ICCT and assign the climate services in the list to appropriate cells in the matrix. Although not rigorous, it will allow the Working Group to revisit the initial rankings in light of the empirical record. In concert with this review, the matrix will be shared with CSP members to elicit their comments on the rankings and to identify additional climate services projects and applications.
3) A typology of potential economic benefits will be developed and used to describe the benefits in specific cells of the matrix. This work will provide the basis for follow-up case study analysis and preparation of a synthesis paper on valuing climate services benefits. |