User selection and engagement for climate services co-production

Abstract

Climate services are high in the international agenda for their potential to help combat the effects of climate change. However, climate science is rarely directly incorporated in the decision-making processes of societal actors, due to what has been identified as the usability gap. The cause behind this gap is partially due to a failure to timely and meaningfully engage users in the production of climate services, as well as misperceptions on which users can best benefit from climate service uptake. In this article we propose user selection and engagement guidelines that integrate important values from participatory science such as those of legitimacy, representativity and agency. The guidelines consist of 5 + 1 steps: defining the why, where, whom, which attributes, which intensity, and how to select and engage with stakeholders. Whilst these steps may be initially implemented by an ideally interdisciplinary team of scientists and service designers, the final step consists of an iterative process by which each decision is agreed together with the identified users and stakeholders under a co-production approach. We believe this systematic user selection and engagement practice is key to support the design of climate services aligned to the actual needs of a wide and inclusive range of empowered societal agents.