Responding to climate services in the context of drought: A systematic review

Abstract

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.