Climate Services Ecosystems: More Bangs for the Bucks

Abstract During the last decades, climate services have been exponentially proliferating in number and diversity. However, in many cases, a profound understanding, coordination, and synergies among the different climate services are missing. This limits society’s opportunities to increase resilience to climate impacts, or—what is worse—the number and diversity of disconnected climate services available to stakeholders can delay, freeze, or even dismantle ongoing adaptation strategies and action plans. Building healthy ecosystems of climate services is a way to guarantee that society enhances resilience, while optimally orchestrating the available resources. A healthy ecosystem implies having the capacity to adapt to changes in the demand of the climate services, their risks, and values. These ecosystems tend to be more robust to climate impacts than an uncoordinated collection of climate services focused on certain applications or just one sector because the shocks to one part of the ecosystem are redistributed. After introducing the concept of climate services ecosystem (CSE) and describing its elements, this paper shows the dynamic relationship between CSE, its value, risk, and resilience. The climate services ecosystem approach assesses the value of an integrated collection of climate services, under scenarios of a changing climate, changes of societal needs, and limited budgets, supporting stakeholders to define what, when, and how to fund climate services. Significance Statement This paper proposes a new approach to analyze climate services from an ecosystem, rather than a disconnected sectoral, perspective. Ecosystems of climate services tend to be more robust to impacts than a collection of individual climate services because the shocks to one part of the ecosystem are redistributed through the network, making communities more resilient to shocks. This system thinking approach also contributes to the discussion around the need for the orchestration of resources, the scalability of climate services, and the implementation of monitoring and evaluation strategies for climate services to assess their impact on society.