Exploring the European climate services landscape: Can we make it more equitable?

Climate services are increasingly recognised as essential tools for supporting decision-making under climate variability and climate change. Although the importance of equitable participation in strengthening collaboration, building trust between climate information providers and users, and supporting more inclusive climate services has already been highlighted, some inequities still remain in the climate services field. This paper integrates methods from Computational Social Sciences to explore the recent evolution and current state of the European climate services landscape. The research process involves the systematic and semi-automated identification, collection, storage, and analysis of qualitative and quantitative data from projects available through the European Commission's CORDIS database. Results reveal that climate services are gaining traction in Europe, illustrated by the increasing funding and number of research projects, many of them primarily focusing on adaptation rather than mitigation. However, the field is currently dominated by academic institutions, with limited involvement from the private sector and low participation from Eastern European countries. These findings are relevant to inform current discussions on supporting an equitable climate services community by describing the current landscape, identifying potential gaps and opportunities for engagement, and demonstrating how Computational Social Sciences methods can support the systematic integration of qualitative textual information into analysis of climate services. Practical implications Climate services are becoming increasingly important in Europe as tools to support decision-making under climate variability and change. Yet, this study shows that the European climate services landscape is uneven in terms of actors involved, regions participating, and topics that receive the most attention, in current research and innovation efforts. The role of the study was to inform the Climateurope2 project in its objective of supporting a more equitable European climate services community by understanding the existing landscape of climate services partnerships within European funding programmes. Mapping these patterns provides an evidence base for identifying potential gaps in participation and informing future stakeholder engagement activities within Climateurope2. Despite the increasing number of projects and funding dedicated to climate services research over time, participation still remains dominated by academic institutions in Western and Southern Europe, with lower representation from private actors and institutions from Central and Eastern Europe. These actors often participate less frequently in EU climate services projects or in more peripheral ways with more limited engagement. Moreover, adaptation clearly appears as the dominant focus in climate services-related projects, while mitigation shows a lower presence in the analysed landscape. While our study does not aim to evaluate whether existing climate services have sufficiently demonstrated benefits for mitigation or for integrated adaptation–mitigation planning, it does reveal a relative separation between these perspectives within the project landscape. We therefore consider this an important area for future research and community-building efforts. Our results suggest that efforts should be directed not only towards increasing participation but also towards broadening the diversity of actors involved in the European climate-services community. This includes bringing the private and public sectors further on board, as well as engaging other communities that have not traditionally been part of the conversation, such as researchers working on climate change mitigation, practitioners from climate-sensitive sectors that do not yet routinely use climate services in their decision-making, and local and indigenous communities. Moreover, this paper demonstrates that project descriptions, abstracts, and other textual materials contain valuable information that is often overlooked. It therefore shows that systematically integrating textual data with quantitative information can inform the climate services field.