Key Messages of 2025

These services should involve appropriate engagement between users and providers, be grounded in scientifically credible information and expertise, incorporate effective access mechanisms, and be specifically co-produced and tailored to meet user needs and enable informed decisions. Addressing this challenge requires much more than simply providing generic climate information to the public and businesses.

The latest findings of the Climateurope2 consortium, dedicated to advancing the development and uptake of climate services and informing their ongoing standardisation, are presented as a series of key messages and recommendations. These have emerged from an analysis using the Climateurope2 Framework for the equitable standardisation of climate services to test several criteria.^[3] The criteria were derived by the consortium’s ongoing work and in consultation with the climate services community through different engagement mechanisms, seeking to understand what can be considered fit-for-purpose climate services, that is, services that demonstrate not only technical quality but also quality requirements across all the components of climate services.

The key messages emphasise the importance of viewing climate services from a holistic perspective and emphasise the importance of accounting for four interconnected components: the decision context, the actors and the co-production processes, the different knowledge systems, and the delivery mode and evaluation.^[4]

Climateurope2 recommends structuring the initiation of the standardisation of climate services by identifying the interconnected i) technical, ii) procedural and iii) performance criteria that would be required for fit-for-purpose climate services to ensure their complexity is captured and to ensure evaluation and eventual certification by accredited actors. Furthermore, we recommend parallel efforts to mature more flexible and open-source best practice guidance that can be made available in a shorter time period than standards.

Many knowledge gaps for standardisation remain, and the Climateurope2 consortium also has recommendations for the research community and for forging necessary partnerships. Research efforts executed in partnership with public and private providers and relevant policy, industry, and community stakeholders are a necessary condition for relevant and salient knowledge and methodologies to become available. Once the relevant criteria for fit-for-purpose climate services have been clarified and enhanced, we will formulate them in the form of recommendations to be integrated into forthcoming regulations and other forms of governance at the EU level. This includes policies regarding resilient critical infrastructure, adaptation and mitigation strategies, the just transition, and other elements of the implementation of the European Green Deal.

Climateurope2 issues key messages and recommendations every year. In the coming year, the consortium will work to further evaluate and modify this initial standardisation strategy, revise and polish the criteria and requirements with additional project work also in collaboration with the community of climate services through ongoing engagement efforts. We will further work to assess the maturity of standardisation of climate services and outline, when possible, the content of concrete standards or guidance documents. To illustrate how this may be implemented in practice, the consortium will also compile case studies that use climate services for addressing the interconnections between adaptation and mitigation, with a special focus on cities.