Reflections on a key component of co-producing climate services: Defining climate metrics from user needs

In this paper the authors present the example of an African climate services project to illustrate how the process of unpacking user needs and defining their decision-relevant climate metrics took place. It highlights how existing social science methods can arise out of, and be embedded within, a different epistemological approach which is characteristic of co-production. It also elaborates how reflexivity and iteration, including on the assumptions around what constitutes knowledge and how it should be generated, are essential at all stages. The practical implications are thus that the process of assessing user needs, which is an essential element of co-producing climate services, can be aided through existing methods applied within a different approach to knowledge production.

For the climate services community, there is clear need to have a more nuanced and critical approach to these tasks – including moving towards an improved typology of climate information and users, and our experience illustrates the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches (as well as the advantage of taking a multiple methods approach, where feasible). For other science-society relations, where dialogue, engagement and communication between scientists and society is critical, our experiences reiterate the importance of empathy. A critical understanding of decision-making contexts, and user needs and preferences, is essential to generate and communicate useful and usable information. This applies at all levels, whether local, for example in citizen science and the establishment of community warning systems; or global, for example in international assessments such as the Intergov-ernmental Panels on Climate Change and Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPCC and IPBES).