Developing national frameworks for climate services: Experiences, challenges and learnings from across Europe

Many countries are actively developing a National Framework for Climate Services (NFCS), driven by a need for better coordination of climate services to support decision making, mandatory climate adaptation and financial reporting, and the assessment of the quality of climate services including their underlying data. A group of five European countries (UK, Ireland, Belgium, Switzerland and Norway) has formed an informal peer-group to support, challenge, and share learning throughout the process of developing and evolving their NFCSs. This perspective article gathers these experiences to distil common themes and challenges as well as to identify unique characteristics and benefits of each country’s experience on their NFCS implementation. While this article focuses on the experiences and practical learning within Europe, the benefit of establishing an NFCS is global, and many of the challenges and learnings presented here will be relevant anywhere in the world.

It is the experience of this group that peer support has accelerated and enhanced the NFCS implementation process, as well as provided a forum for exchange on how to maintain and evolve an operational NFCS. Based on this experience, we propose an additional step as part of the WMO’s ‘Step-by-step Guidelines for Establishing a National Framework for Climate Services’ (WMO, 2018) to support countries to maintain and evolve their operational frameworks. Additionally, we recommend regional or global peer support on this framework development process should be sought, encouraged and facilitated.