Co-development of place-based climate services for action – Co-Cli-Serv

Co-cli-serv explores novel ways to transform climate science into action-oriented place-based climate services to engage, enable and empower local communities, knowledge brokers and scientists to act locally. It seeks to identify future information needs and the nature of the climate science needed to address the local communities’ concerns, aspirations and goals in view of climate variability and climate change.
It will develop a novel approach for co-constructing climate services to support local planning and adaptation decision-making. Co-cli-serv will establish a collaborative relationship between climate science and local communities in five representative case studies across NW Europe; (i) Bergen in Norway; (ii) Brest and the Golfe du Morbihan in France, Dordrecht and surrounding area in the Netherlands, and communities along the Wadden Sea in Germany. The project will engage a wide spectrum of actors from local government, to the tourism industry, to local NGOs and to professional associations.
It aims to proactively connect climate science with local communities, using local narratives as an entry point, and vision planning and adaptive pathways as co-construction locus. Central in Co-cli-serv's approach is its focus on narratives of change as a localisation device. Narratives give meaning to facts and scientific calculations. They turn ‘matters of fact’ into ‘matters of concern’.
Grounded in such narratives, vision-based scenarios will be developed by employing an incremental and community-led strategy, enabling the identification of current AND future knowledge needs. The project will experiment with art–science–policy integration in the case studies. Building on existing climate science and practices, Co-cli-serv will instigate and sustain community dialogues to co-construct place-based climate services. It takes systematic critical reflection on knowledge quality as the central activity in interfacing climate science and local governance.