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Due to increased extreme weather events as a consequence of climate change, climate risk analysis has become an essential issue for all critical infrastructures, including airports. The aim of this paper is to apply a climate risk assessment framework to evaluate the impacts of extreme temperatures on several Italian airports: Malpensa, Linate, Bergamo, Ciampino, Fiumicino, Napoli, Catania, Palermo, and Cagliari. According to the risk definition recommended in the Fifth Assessment Report of IPCC (2014), specific hazard, exposure and vulnerability indicators were identified. The hazard indicators were calculated using the UERRA regional reanalysis for the observed period (1981–2010), and then their climate variations were evaluated by means an ensemble of high-resolution climate projections from the EURO-CORDEX initiative for the near (2021–2050), medium (2041–2070), and long-term future period (2071–2100), under RCP 2.6, RCP 4.5, and RCP 8.5 scenarios. Exposure and vulnerability data were collected from multiple sources, such as official airports documents or websites. The final risk index obtained from the combination of these three factors allowed us to identify which of the selected airports are probable to face the major impacts due to extreme temperature events. This paper provides the knowledge base on risk assessment on Italian airports, with the aim to support the stakeholders for the selection and implementation of appropriate adaptation strategies and measures in relation to extreme temperatures.

Climate Services (CS) are increasingly being employed to address challenges resulting from climatic hazards. Research has focused on identifying and categorising CS, CS uptake, barriers to use, and CS user needs. Findings on empirical responses to CS are scattered. The aim of this paper is to systematically review existing literature on behavioural, perception, and attitude responses to CS, in the context of drought. Our review considers CS responses explicitly and is not limited to specific user groups or regions. Using the Web of Science database, we identified 88 journal articles containing terms related to CS, behaviour and droughts, published between 1999 and 2022. We identified and classified the characteristics of the CS, responses to CS, and the impacts that these responses had. We find that behavioural responses are reported more frequently than attitude and perception responses to CS. Half of the CS users consisted of farmers, mostly provided with seasonal forecasts, who respond to the CS information predominantly by changing crops or crop planting/harvesting dates. Non-farmers responded to CS behaviourally by enacting or developing plans, policies, or programs. This overview provides an evidence base towards the assessment of impacts of CS, and suggests that further developing CS could require a shift from providing precise climate or weather data, towards providing how climate or weather information relates to the decision-spaces of users.

Developing and implementing climate adaptation measures in complex socio-ecological systems can lead to unintended consequences, especially when those systems are undergoing rapid hydro-climatic and socio-economic change. In these dynamic contexts, a systemic approach can make the difference between adaptive and maladaptive outcomes. This paper focuses on the use of climate services, often touted as no-regret solutions, and their potential to generate maladaptation. We explored the interactions between climate services and adaptation/maladaptation across five case studies affected by different types of natural hazards and characterized by a range of hydro-climatic and socio-economic conditions. Using system archetypes, we show how climate services can play a role in both producing and preventing maladaptation. The dynamics explored through system archetypes are: i) “fixes that fail”, where short-sighted solutions fail to address the root causes of a problem; ii) “band aid solutions”, where the benefits brought about in the short-term come at the expenses of delaying long-term adaptive actions; and iii) “success to the successful”, where some groups increasingly benefit from climate services at the expenses of other groups. We demonstrate how these dynamics constitute maladaptive processes, as well as identifying the tools and theories that can be used in this type of assessment. Finally, we provide a framework and recommendations to guide the ex-ante assessment of maladaptation risk when designing and implementing climate services.

Increasingly challenged by climate variability and change, many of the world’s governments have turned to climate services as a means to improve decision making and mitigate climate-related risk. While there have been some efforts to evaluate the economic impact of climate services, little is known about the contexts in which investments in climate services have taken place. An understanding of the factors that enable climate service investment is important for the development of climate services at local, national and international levels. This paper addresses this gap by investigating the context in which Uruguay’s Ministry of Livestock, Agriculture and Fisheries invested in and developed its National System of Agriculture Information (SNIA), a national-level climate service for the agriculture sector. Using qualitative research methods, the paper uses key documents and 43 interviews to identify six factors that have shaped the decision to invest in the SNIA: (1) Uruguay’s focus on sustainable agricultural intensification; (2) previous work on climate change adaptation; (3) the modernization of the meteorological service; (4) the country’s open data policy; (5) the government’s decision to focus the SNIA on near-term (e.g., seasonal) rather than long-term climate risk; and (6) the participation of key individuals. While the context in which these enablers emerged is unique to Uruguay, it is likely that some factors are generalizable to other countries. Social science research needed to confirm the wider applicability of innovation systems, groundwork, data access and champion is discussed.

With the help of the systematic review method of 118 papers, we challenge the common assumption regarding the climate information services (CIS) design and features and its role in adaptation response. The review highlights the key consideration and recommendations for future researchers, particularly CIS applicability in adaptation. (1) Most research concentrated on transmitting daily, monthly, and seasonal predictions instead of forecast visualization and co-production. It might make the difference between seasonal and near-term projections unclear to farmers and researchers; (2) The forecast’s probabilistic nature is not the only source of uncertainty; studies have neglected to elicit other factors, such as the social and physiological effects of incorrect forecasts, the lack of data on various factors influencing extreme weather events, farmers’ inability to decipher the information, and variations in the local language; (3) Considerable research is on forecast accuracy, skills, and the lead time but side-lined the association of these variables with different types of forecasts at different farming cycles; (4) There is limited reporting on the accessibility of climate services according to socio-demographic variables and forecast values; (5) More research highlights the impact of CIS on adaptation activity at various timelines and crop seasons, but limited ex-ante evaluations cannot uncover deficiencies in agricultural practices and information transmission. The investigations were predominately ex-post evaluations, but there was little proof of how much decisions differed between experimental and control groups.

While the prioritisation of scarce resources for climate adaptation is becoming a priority for low and middle income countries, the climate service literature addressing adaptation prioritisation decisions is scarce. This paper contributes to filling this gap by presenting a co-creation process carried out in the Maldives among representatives of government, civil society and researchers. Together, we identified the need to improve a ranking method currently used by the Maldivian government to prioritise islands for investments in erosion prevention. As a solution we developed a layered index. The first layer of this index captures the objective dimension of the problem through an erosion hazard subindex, using the three variables wave energy, reef health and reef flat minimum width. The second layer captures the normative dimension through a multi-criteria analysis using the erosion hazard subindex as one criterion next to other stakeholder selected criteria such as critical infrastructure, economic activity, per capita income and the potential to house additional people that resettle from riskier places as sea-level rise progresses. Results of this new ranking method show that socioeconomic criteria were considered more important by the stakeholders than the biophysical criterion of erosion hazard. Among the top-ranked islands are many regional centres but also less populous islands that have a large potential to house additional people. Lessons learnt from the co-creation process highlight the importance of assembling interdisciplinarity teams, fostering mutual learning among project participants, and designing research projects that do not prescribe upfront the exact problems to be addressed and methods to be applied.

The success of climate services for adaptation to climate change is increasingly studied, but there exists a varying understanding of what climate services are and what makes them successful. This study systematically mapped the breadth and depth of peer-reviewed literature on the subject and synthesized evidence on what we know, don’t know and need to know about successful climate services. The study focusses on services that are based on long-term climate information or aim to inform decision-making on longer time scales and includes papers that inform on success, including evaluation studies, empirical investigations in the factors and practices that influence success, and conceptual discussions on what constitutes success.Results show that insights on climate service success are scattered and most often originate from western and developed countries. Conceptualizations of success in the literature are diverse and focus on processes for production and use, product characteristics and process elements of the service itself, and/or on contextual factors. Studies that assess the results of climate services tend to focus on evaluating (perceived) usability, though uptake, impacts and outcomes of services are rarely assessed systematically. Frequently reported success factors include brokering functions, user-producer interactions and iterative and flexible development processes. To be successful, services themselves should be contextualized and tailored to the user and its decision-making context. We conclude that whilst context emerges as a critical determinant of success, the configuration of factors and processes leading to success demand further investigation.

In the West African Sahel, climate variability and climate change pose huge challenges to food security and health, particularly for poor and marginalised population groups. Co-production of actionable climate information between scientists and users has been advocated to increase its use in climate change adaptation. Consequently, Weather and Climate Services (WCS) co-production models have been expanding, but there have been few evaluations of their effects. Those that exist mostly focus on the end user. The empirical contribution of this paper is an evidence-based evaluation of the scaling of WCS based on co-production models in Senegal. The methodological contribution is a systemic and iterative evaluation method involving multiple analytical tools. The scaling of WCS in Senegal involved at least 161 actors and resulted in five axes of transformation: 1) continuous improvement of WCS, 2) emergence and consolidation of WCS facilitators, 3) inclusion of WCS in action planning, 4) active mobilisation to sustain WCS scaling, and 5) empowerment of actors. New users and uses emerged beyond agriculture, involving the fisheries, water and energy sectors, producing changes in institutional communication strategies, operational planning, and in coordination between actors. Enabling factors for scaling included capacity strengthening, knowledge-sharing and action platforms, interaction opportunities, and financial and political support. However, reduced precision of forecasts over time is perceived. New challenges are emerging including improving delivery and finer grain information, getting the private sector involved, and building capacity and trust at a large scale, to keep pace with the increase in uses and users

In this paper, we attempt to unpack the existing landscape of agricultural extension services and delve into questions of access to and localisation of knowledge to understand how these conditions (access and localisation) determine climate change adaptation in agriculture in the southern Indian state of Karnataka. Our empirical findings suggest that the current extension framework reproduces existing inequalities in that access to institutional knowledge and its uptake is linked to one’s social location, that is, caste, gender, class, and geographic location, and information shared is neither timely nor contextually relevant. Employing accessibility and localization as lenses of inquiry, we argue from empirical evidence that smallholder farmers in a rain-fed context are especially vulnerable to the risks posed by climatic change and hence agricultural extension (with climate-informed knowledge) should be to be seen as a critical enabler of adaptation; ensuring accessibility and localisation, we argue, strengthens climate services, and by extension, enables adaptation to climatic risks. The issues that encumber effective extension, we contend, can be mitigated by a re-imagination of agricultural extension, one that privileges public field level functionaries as conduits between state departments and farmers over other modes, and enables structured involvement of community collectives as vehicles to address local needs and ensure access. Drawing on interventions in our study sites, we make a case for promoting knowledge systems that ensure access to climate-specific agricultural information and contextual embeddedness.

Climate change projections have been the primary informational currency for exploring the impacts of climate change and thus informing how to prepare for and adapt to those projected impacts. However, climate indicators, which we define as observed climate trends, conditions, and impacts often associated with socioeconomic consequences, can also be helpful in motivating or shaping adaptation actions. In this paper, we explore the use of climate indicators in adaptation decision-making through three detailed case studies. We find that climate indicators play an important and sometimes foundational role in the context setting and support building stages of the decision process. We also find that climate indicators sometimes play a role in the informing policy-decision stage. However, climate indicators play a limited and less explicit role in the implementing and evaluating policy stages of the decision process. Ultimately, an integrated approach that draws upon both climate indicators and climate projections to support adaptation decision-making is more productive than a narrow focus on climate projections alone.

Decision-makers today have relatively easy web-based access to climate projections from several different models and downscaled datasets. Yet, there is minimal guidance on the credibility and appropriate use of such models and projections for specific adaptation contexts. The few studies that provide recommendations on model choice are often based on evaluations of broad physical climate metrics (such as temperature averages or extremes) at regional scales, without additional examination of local-scale decision-relevant climatic metrics (such as growing degree days or chill hours) that underpin the adaptation action. While such broad regional skill may be considered necessary for the overall credibility of models, it is not clear whether it is sufficient to ensure good skill for decision applications. This paper evaluates the skill of different Global Circulation Models (GCMs) in predicting the decision-relevant metric of chill hours in Fresno, California, and examines how model selection impacts future projections. We find that good skill in predicting broader physical climate metrics in California does not guarantee skill in prediction of chill hours in Fresno. In fact, the models with good regional climatic skill were mutually exclusive of the ones with good skill for chill hours, which leads to some counterintuitive results for this unique metric. Since many decision-relevant metrics are non-linear derivations of primary physical quantities (like the chill hour metric), more such decision-relevant model evaluations are needed to provide better insights on model credibility and choice for adaptation decisions.

This perspective paper reports the results of a collaborative survey of French research institutes concerned with environmental issues, which examined the potential for a market uptake of climate services for adaptation in France. The study is based on a review of existing reports on the market of climate services, and on interviews of 68 climate service providers and users in public and private organizations. Although the study does not allow to provide quantified estimations regarding the present and future size of the market, its results offer new perspectives with implications extending far beyond the sole case of France: first, while the market is still in its infancy, significant opportunities exist in sectors such as flooding risks, and, to a slightly lesser extent, hydro and nuclear energy and viticulture. In addition, the study identifies critical conditions for the uptake in climate services: (1) a coordinated delivery of data, information, expertise and training by public research institutes concerned with climate change and its impacts; (2) the inclusion of adaptation in the regulation and in public and private tenders. Finally, (3) uncertainties in climate projections appear as a major barrier to the uptake of climate services. However, ambitious greenhouse gas emission reduction as planned by the COP-21 Paris Agreement contribute to reducing this uncertainties by allowing users to select a subset of climate change projections, avoiding those for which adaptation is most problematic.

Cities are key players in climate change adaptation and mitigation due to a spatial concentration of assets, people and economic activities. They are thus contributing to and especially vulnerable to climate change. Identifying, planning, implementing and monitoring respective measures in cities is challenging and resource consuming. The paper outlines challenges for adaptation, discusses most common approaches and argues why implementation of theoretical methods has its shortcomings. Based on case studies, an innovative, practice-oriented approach has been tested to develop a climate service prototype product. It provides a general framework that allows a flexible and customised support for cities to adapt to expected impacts of a changing climate.