Key Messages of 2026

This lack of shared understanding is reflected in the European climate services landscape, which is highly heterogenous and characterised by limited coordination and coherence. A significant share of climate services activity continues to take place within externally funded research projects, with academic and research organisations forming a well-connected core of providers. Alongside these actors, National Hydrometeorological Services and a highly diverse set of private providers are becoming increasingly important contributors to the provision of climate-related information and services.

However, coordination across these communities remains limited. Private providers in particular play an increasingly prominent role, yet they typically lack shared coordination structures and continue to operate in a highly fragmented landscape. Moreover, many organisations providing climate-related information and advice do not identify their work as “climate services”, instead referring to it through other market-driven labels and service categories, such as climate risk assessment, climate analytics, climate intelligence, sustainability services, or climate disclosure services. At the same time, the term “climate services” is sometimes applied very broadly, encompassing activities that are not primarily concerned with drawing on knowledge of climate conditions, such as emissions accounting or energy efficiency measures.

Within this diverse ecosystem, some providers focus primarily on the collection, synthesis, analysis and reanalysis of climate data and information. Others derive their value from being close to the users and decision processes, or from meeting specific sectoral and regulatory demands. Some may refer to the former as upscale climate services providers and the latter as downscale providers. In practice, however, most actors operate across multiple parts of the climate services value chain, often through partnerships that connect upstream data infrastructures with downstream sectoral expertise and user engagement. Upstream providers frequently collaborate with intermediaries to better understand user needs, while downstream providers rely on upstream data and scientific foundations to ensure credibility, robustness, and legitimacy.

Together, this institutional fragmentation and conceptual ambiguity contribute to ongoing challenges in developing a shared understanding of what constitutes a climate service, complicating efforts to coordinate provision, assess quality, and support standardisation.

Against this background, the CE2 consortium placed special focus during 2025 on climate services provision beyond academia, particularly services designed for real-world decision contexts of clients or users. In-depth case studies and a series of sectoral workshops addressing the delivery of climate services in sectors critical for Europe’s resilience have enabled the consortium to better understand what is needed to build the coherence and uniformity required for meaningful standardisation. We have structured this analysis through the lenses of the climate services components previously identified by CE2.^[1] These four components are: understanding the decision context, the ecosystem of actors and co-production processes, the diverse knowledge systems, and the delivery mode and evaluation, together covering the full value chain of climate services. In the previous edition of the Climateurope2 Key Messages, we highlighted technical, procedural and performance aspects of climate services as a foundation for standardisation.^[2] In this edition, we deepen this approach by making these components more granular. Specifically, the project has worked to identify sub-components that provide a structured and replicable framework across diverse types of climate services, clarify standardisable elements, and ensure consistency while avoiding excessive homogenisation.

The key messages that follow emerge from an in-depth analysis of how three different public and private providers, each delivering climate services in non-research contexts, address these four components and the relative importance they assign to different elements within each. During 2025, CE2 partners engaged in dialogue with Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S), Europe’s most important public provider of climate information. Partners also worked with a spin off consultancy services organisation linked to a parent research institute that provides climate services focused on flood risk, one of Europe’s most significant climate hazards. Further insights were drawn from engagement with a private provider delivering climate services to support sustainability reporting needs, particularly under the EU Taxonomy.

The key messages also draw on outcomes from the first meeting among leading private climate service providers in Europe, where participants shared insights on current practices, challenges, and differences across organisational types and market segments.^[3] Additional findings emerge from a workshop focused on climate services for the health sector^[4] and a workshop with specialists at the interface of climate services, insurance, reinsurance and finance. These sectors, where climate service provision has reached different levels of maturity, offer important lessons for developing salient, effective and context-sensitive services tailored to concrete decision needs.

Building on previous synthesis exercises and ongoing project work, CE2 has identified an initial set of principles, requirements, and recommendations for ensuring the salience, quality, effectiveness and performance of each climate services component. During 2025, project partners further evaluated these lessons learned and their implications for standardisation. The key messages presented below reflect this work by disaggregating the components into smaller sub-components and providing a preliminary identification of core standardisable elements at this level of detail. Finally, these key messages also draw on wider project outputs from 2025.