Advanced Guiding Principles of high-quality Climate Services

The market for climate services has developed rapidly over the past decade, originating from seasonal forecasts issued by public and private (weather) services to a crowded landscape with a wide range of applications for climate change adaptation and mitigation. To ensure quality, trust, and usability in this emerging market the Climateurope2 (CE2) project aims to help develop future equitable and quality-assured climate services to all sectors of society by developing standards for climate services, supporting an equitable European climate services community and enhancing the uptake of quality-assured climate services to support adaptation and mitigation to climate change. One of the elements required to achieve these goals is the definition of (high-)quality climate services. What makes up a good climate service? Is there a common ground across the huge variety of providers, products, and users of climate services? Can a climate service or parts of it be standardised to ensure and to improve quality, usability, and trust? In this deliverable, we refine and enrich the first set of guiding principles for high-quality climate services, which were developed based on a comprehensive literature review (D4.1), by incorporating additional information obtained by Cimateurope2 through community engagement, such as a survey, a set of interviews conducted with users and providers of climate services, workshops and a number of case studies. According to the results obtained from the different sources mentioned above, quality criteria and indicators for high-quality climate services were prioritized and allocated to the guiding principles. Thus, we provide a more in-depth analysis on which indicators and criteria are most important to characterize quality of a climate service and which ones are most relevant to the user (and provider) community. Finally, we assess which of these criteria and indicators are useful and mature for a standardization process of climate services. As identified in D4.1 guiding principles for high-quality climate services should be science-based, user-centred, designed with transparent and collaborative processes, delivered in a timely and accessible manner, sustainable and equitable.