The Development, Use and Interpretation of Climate Projections to Support Regional and National Climate Services

The climate information and applications landscape is expansive and complex. Many different resources exist, and some resources may be more appropriate for particular adaptation planning purposes than others. Several IPCC and National Assessment reports note that there is a strong need to develop and make public, guidance for regions and countries to (1) assist in identifying and accessing quality and appropriate climate information; (2) ensure consistent application of climate information parameters, including but not limited to timeframes, emissions scenarios, and risk tolerance levels; (3) ensure appropriate interpretation of climate information; and (4) ensure consistency across public and private sectors with regard to evaluations of the impacts of climate change on their operations, capabilities, facilities, and public services. Within that broad spectrum nations and communities increasingly rely on climate change projections to guide risk management planning, mitigation, and adaptation implementation. In that context the development of guidance to provide good practices and standards for the production, interpretation and usage of regional and national climate change projections, has been deemed essential by member countries, ensuring that uncertainties are appropriately characterized for applications and decision-making.

The World Meteorological Organization constitutes 193 countries and territories, and facilitates the "free and unrestricted" exchange of data, information, and research between the respective meteorological and hydrological institutions of its members. It also collaborates with nongovernmental partners and other international organizations on matters related to environmental protection, climate change, resource management, and socioeconomic development. Within many climate services evaluation studies understanding how uncertainty is addressed when scenarios and stakeholder confidence change, is not explicitly engaged beyond a few cases. Analyses lacking these considerations elevate both the likelihood of the underestimating the types and robustness of knowledge needed and of maladaptation risks. Researchers have cautioned that in spite of providing guidance on interpreting projections, reporting that severe risks are “projected” to occur at a particular time and location leads to a “false sense of inevitability”. Consequentially, such approaches can blinker decisionmakers to the potential of compounding factors and within-event thresholds, giving a misplaced sense of rigor and concreteness.

As part of advancing the next stage of the Global Framework on Climate Services, an international team of researchers and practitioners led by the authors are explicitly directed by member countries to develop guidance on good practices and standards in the production, interpretation and usage of regional and national climate change projections. The purposes of the guidelines are to address demands, challenges and opportunities in the development and use of climate projections (or climate information about the future) with full acknowledgment of cascading events, uncertainties and variability.

The presentation (and guidance) discusses how to distill robust (not just any) climate information to support strategic initiatives and decisionmaking.

The guidance outlines

1. Climate risk management as a cross-timescale challenge including the need to address conditional factors at regional and local levels
2. A “protocol” for the guiding development and use of regional and national projections to inform decisionmaking
3. Broadening the network of actors and stakeholders
4. Monitoring, evaluation and learning
5. Case studies and examples of applications, benefits, challenges e.g. Water resources, resilient infrastructure design, ecosystems, national plans.
6. Procedures for screening climate risks especially for information/resource-constrained situations

Most critically we will outline measures evaluating role of effective development and use of projections across the climate services value chain, and ongoing approaches for prototyping the guidance within regional and national climate services frameworks being crafted and implemented in countries across the world. Countries and communities (and the researchers and practitioners in they employ) are encouraged to understand the kinds of data, techniques, and limitations inherent in the tools and applications below and to exercise similar caution in using resources that have not been quality assured.