The Role of the Copernicus Climate Change Service in Supporting Adaptation to Climate Variability and Change

One of the most critical issue of climate change adaptation is that whilst the climate drivers are often operating at large scales, to be effective the responses must be site and context specific. Co-design and co-production have been proposed as effective ways of ensuring usability, relevance and saliency of the services being developed. This however requires both dedicated effort and context specific knowledge that in most cases are not available among the organisations producing climate data.
The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), implemented by ECMWF on behalf of the European Union, has tackled this issue by developing a Climate Data Store (CDS). The CDS is a standardised entry-point to a huge wealth of geographically distributed, quality controlled data which allows for the free development of tailored applications and services on a cloud-based computational platform. Detaching the service development from user engagement and from co-design effectively empowers intermediate (purveyors, knowledge brokers, ...) users to develop their own user-facing applications whilst at the same time ensuring the quality of the tools, the data and the available documentation. Such intermediaries play a double role: firstly they develop value-added services for the final users, whose decision context they fully understand, secondly they can feed user requirements back, in a way that can lead to an evolution of the data and functionalities provided by the CDS. The design of the entire system makes no assumption on who these intermediaries are and imposes no limitation on the use of data. Here we present a series of demonstration projects that illustrate how the CDS infrastructure can be used to address specific climate-related decisions in specific sectoral areas.