Ambition setting through climate services to drive climate resilient development

• Ambition setting is essential for fostering transformations towards climate resilient futures. • Ambition setting connects envisioning futures with setting goals and actions to achieve them. • Climate services and tools can support ambition setting, illustrated by four examples. • Four key criteria for climate services and tools for ambition setting are defined. Climate change adaptation efforts need to accelerate and scale-up to deal with increasing climate change impacts worldwide in order to safeguard the resilience of societies. Currently adaptation action is merely following a risk-based planning approach, going from identifying a climate related risk to directly finding solutions. This has resulted into largely fragmented, local, and incremental adaptation actions up to present. There is a need for transformational change, and combining adaptation with other policy objectives, to speed up action towards climate resilient development. However, this integration alone may not be sufficient to address the systemic transformation required to tackle the root causes of existing challenges and underlaying vulnerabilities. A broader perspective is needed to envision the “future we want” and defining key goals and actions to achieve these futures. We believe that such an ambition setting process is critical, and commonly missing in adaptation planning. With ambition setting we mean a policy process that entails developing visions coupled with identifying goals and actions that work towards these visions. Ambition setting builds upon understanding the desired transformations in the system and the root cause of present challenges, including risks and vulnerabilities. To put ambition setting into practice climate services and tools can be employed. We identify key criteria supporting the selection of such tools and provide four examples showcasing how the tools support ambition setting. A tradition of ambition setting should be fostered, as well as tools and services should be further developed in parallel to accelerate transformations towards climate resilient development.