Climate Services Ecosystems: more bang for the bucks

During the last decade climate services have been exponentially proliferating innumber and diversity. Without the profound understanding, coordination and synergies among thedifferent climate services present in a particular country, society can miss opportunities to increaseresilience to climate impacts, or -what is worse- the number and diversity of disconnected climateservices available to stakeholders can delay, freeze or even dismantle ongoing adaptation strategiesand action plans. Building healthy ecosystems of climate services is a way to guarantee that societyenhances resilience, while optimally orchestrating the available resources. These ecosystems tendto be more robust to climate impacts than a collection of climate services focused on certainapplications or just one sector, because shocks to one part of the ecosystem are redistributed anddampened through the entire network. The paper describes the concept and elements of climateservices ecosystems and introduces the use of Network Analysis and Dynamic Causal NetworkTheory to compare ecosystems of climate services. It further assess what are the most efficientnetwork configurations to efficiently communicate and use climate information produced by thedifferent actors in the ecosystem. This approach provides an objective way to assess potential oractual causal relationships between their elements, the dynamics of their interactions and the valueof the ecosystem. The climate services ecosystem approach assesses the value of an integratedcollection of climate services, under scenarios of a changing climate, changes of societal needs andlimited budgets, supporting stakeholders to define what, when and how to fund climate services.