Climate services ecosystems

During the last decade climate services have been exponentially proliferating in number and diversity. Without the profound understanding, coordination and synergies among the different climate services present in a particular country, society can miss opportunities to increase resilience to climate impacts, or -what is worse- the number and diversity of disconnected climate services available to stakeholders can delay, freeze or even dismantle ongoing adaptation strategies and action plans. Building healthy ecosystems of climate services is a way to guarantee that society enhances resilience, while optimally orchestrating the available resources. These ecosystems tend to be more robust to climate impacts than a collection of climate services focused on certain applications or just one sector, because shocks to one part of the ecosystem are redistributed and dampened through the entire network. This PhD dissertation describes the concept and elements of climate services ecosystems and introduces the use of Network Analysis and Dynamic Causal Network Theory to compare ecosystems of climate services. This approach provides an objective way to assess potential or actual causal relationships between their elements, the dynamics of their interactions and the value of the ecosystem. The climate services ecosystem approach assesses the value of an integrated collection of climate services, under forecasts and scenarios of a changing climate, changes in policies or interventions, changes of societal needs and limited budgets, supporting stakeholders to define what, when and how to fund climate services to enhance the resilience of communities and societies.