Co-development of place-based climate services for action

The CoCliServ project explored how we can develop fine-scaled and bespoke information to support local adaptation to a changing climate. It studied how scientists can work with communities to jointly produce climate information specific to particular places and local activities. The project worked to transform general "climate science" into bespoke "climate products and services" that help communities understand local climate variability and change, and plan for the places they live. Bergen was one of five places across Europe studied in CoCliServ. The project's co-development of climate services used local narratives of change over time as an entry point. Such narratives are important in order to root climate adaptation governance and climate science inputs to adaptation in context, so that people can make sense of climate as part of their everyday lives. For instance, the narratives show that Bergen has changed from a city whose identity was traditionally defined by the weather to being a city defined by its concern for climate. In parallel, CoCliServ experimented with art science policy integration, instigated community dialogues about climate services, and developed tools for critical reflection on the quality of climate science for local governance. The work of the international consortium was organized in work packages, and the Bergen team contributed to all work packages. The UiB team's main contributions to the project's results include eliciting and analyzing 'narratives of change' in Bergen which we presented at a major conference in 2019 and assembled in a UiB-led special issue of the journal Climate Risk Management. We organized a major scenario workshop with key actors in Bergen, to elicit which information will be important, with findings captured in a paper published in Climate Services. We developed the knowledge quality assessment guidance for climate services, included in a UiB-led special issue of the journal Frontiers in Climate. We initiated and facilitated the establishment of an autonomous citizen science group in Bergen. CoCliServ research in Bergen was conducted in collaboration with local actors variously engaged in climate governance - from government policymakers to NGO representatives, cultural figures, climate services practitioners, private consultants, researchers and marginalized groups - so that project findings are targeted toward climate information demands in Bergen. Project outputs were regularly fed back to groups for validation as being of concrete use or benefit, in various institutional settings. Five key social benefits include: Bergen as a climate city: The project studied how concern for climate change has grown since 2000. This is important because it changes how people in the city conceive of themselves; from people resilient to wild weather, to being vulnerable to climate change. Social climate services in Bergen: The scenario workshop highlighted a surprising finding; that governance actors in Bergen want to see existing climate information better adapted to social functions. This is important because it can change the direction of information efforts in local government and scientific institutions. It is captured in a submitted manuscript, focusing on the social functions of climate services, and the municipality has asked for a presentation of the paper in 2021. Autonomous citizen science: We held four workshops where participating citizens assembled about 150 low-cost open-hardware weather stations. There was a lot of enthusiasm around this work. The dataset contains now more than 3 years of Bergen-wide high-resolution climate data, and the initiative was covered by two newspaper articles and a TV article on NRK and encouraged many actors to rethink ways of doing adaptation science and governance. It was also at the core of a special session on rethinking weather forecasts at Media City Bergen, in 2019. Framework for knowledge quality assessment: We developed a guidance and framework for knowledge quality assessment with climate services practitioners, to evaluate the quality of the workshops in the collaborative research project Klimathon. The feedback from those we worked with was that this presented a practical and useful evaluation framework, that could be implemented in future climate services. It is the subject of a published paper. The primstav exercise: This exercise, which is about making a modern primstav, was jointly developed with artists at Aldea atelier and visual artists at the UiB Faculty of Art, Music and Design (KMD). It was deployed at the science open days at Festplassen in 2019, with over 150 students, and subsequently in an Oslo art exhibition, a classroom exercise in Bergen, and a workshop for volunteer adults. Altogether, well over 200 people have been involved in this exercise. It will be taught in a course for trainee teachers in December 2021 and will be central to a methods course at University of Edinburgh.

- Thanks to CoCiServ's community-led scenario development, scientists and and a wide range of local actors in Bergen have gained an increased understanding and awareness of the local climate adaptation challenges and how scientific and local knowledge can be better mobilized and quality controlled to help addressing these challenges. - CoCliServ has enabled the establishment of an active autonomous citizen science group in Bergen with more than 150 participants that build and use low-cost open-hardware automated weather stations placed all over Bergen, coupled to an online interactive map and long-term data repository. It is linked to similar citizen science initiatives in other countries such as the Netherlands. - The novel Co-QA framework for participatory Knowledge Quality Assessment developed and tested in CoCliServ is now being used in another RCN funded project: LoVeSeSDG (Localizing and developing SDG-thinking for local communities).

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.