Bern,
Switzerland, September 5–8, 2017.
Guillermo Podestá participated in the ICRD Conference with the presentation "Climate services: fostering more effective use of information to support decision-making in climate-sensitive sectors of society". His lecture was included in the session: Enhancing utilization of Climate Services for strengthening livelihoods in low and middle income countries.
We share main
parts of the session´s concept note:
Ongoing changes in climate patterns are expected to put further strain on livelihoods in climate vulnerable regions hindering global efforts for boosting poverty reduction, food security and the reduction of environmental liabilities as stipulated in the Agenda 2030. Increasing frequencies of extreme events such as droughts, shifts in temporal distribution of rainfalls and intense precipitation impact the agricultural production, the food security and livelihoods of poor rural communities affecting health, water, sanitation, education and other sectors, eventually reducing also residence of the livelihood systems.In a changing climate existing traditional indicators for changes in weather and climate patterns based on indigenous knowledge become less reliable for agricultural decision-making practices and can therefore be complemented with new indicators coming from climate science. Availability of and easy access to climate services is hence a key component for increasing climate resilience of vulnerable populations. Anticipating and communicating the evolution of weather and climate patterns, such services have the potential to be a unique instrument for adaptation. Efficient climate monitoring and early warning systems can very much benefit the coordination of contingency plans, interventions, and recovery activities related to extreme events such as frosts and droughts. Hereby the national weather services play a central role in providing the pertinent services. However, the process of generating reliable climate information is a significant challenge for national weather services of many developing and emerging countries. And even where available, making it useful and available for end-users remains a considerable challenge due to cognitive and cultural differences and institutional constraints.
In order to overcome these key constraints and exploit the full potential of climate information for the concerned populations, it is indispensable to enable the local provider to produce climate information of sufficient quality and to bridge the gap to the users. In other words, the entire value chain from strengthening the national weather service to reaching out to the end users in various sectors needs to be addressed in interventions of this kind. Thus, enabling the production of climate information and implementation of climate services needs to be tailored to the different vulnerable groups by taking their specific livelihood features into account through public policy informed by rigorously established objective evidence. In particular, transdisciplinary collaborations which combine knowledge from natural and social science and traditional ecological knowledge are required to inform decision makers at different political and functional levels in the implementation process in order to improve the interface between climate service provider and user.
Conceptual framework
Applying a transdisciplinary approach to the integration of different forms of knowledge means to establish a dialogue which aims at co-creating three interrelated forms of knowledge, i.e. system knowledge (showing how the systems work that are producing climate services), target knowledge (referring to the goals and underlying values that must guide the innovation of climate services), and transformation knowledge (showing how one can concretely achieve and implement more effective climate services). This means that research “…cannot do it alone. When you look at any issue, such as food or water scarcity, it is very clear that no individual institution, government or company can provide the solution” (Paul Polman, CEO Unilever, in Gray and Stites, 2013), i.e. you need across sector/sphere partnerships in order to address pressing issues in their entirety. A partnership is said to be transformative the greater the shared responsibility and the larger the addressed issue, or encompassing the approach (see Figure from Gray and Stites, 2013). From the lower left-hand corner to the upper right hand corner the partnerships increase in scope, complexity and shared responsibility. Partnerships in the lower left-hand corner largely represent philanthropic partnerships (i.e. donors intervening in a recipient country), often driven by threat induced, compliance or charity. Partnerships in the upper-right area represent the partnerships with so-called transformational or transformative engagement, in which all key stakeholders are involved in sustained interactions, and are equally responsive to all partners’ needs. The necessary collaborative governance should be understood in the context of the changing roles of governments ('do more with less') and the increasing complexity of problems clearly requiring transdisciplinary approaches addressing the science policy interface (Hirsch et al. 2006).This said, if we have to break it down in the development context and value the benefits climate services can have in number of climate-sensitive sectors, things quickly get very intricate. Numerous issues need to be addressed from science to operations to communication to policy making, and much of this for each sector individually. Hereby the institutional strength of the climate service providers is key and vitally depends on the government’s political priorities, which can be influenced by demonstrating the potential socioeconomic value and benefits of such services. More specifically related to our session this means we are to elucidate aspects and elements of our activities which can promote developing our partnerships towards being progressively more transformative and need, generally speaking, to cover the themes of science and research, implementation and policy.
