The ERA-NET Consortium “European Research Area for Climate Services”, so-called ERA4CS, has been designed to boost the development of efficient Climate Services in Europe, by supporting research for developing better tools, methods and standards on how to produce, transfer, communicate and use reliable climate information to cope with current and future climate variability.
The INNOVA project members consider Climate Services as the user-driven development, translation and transfer of climate knowledge to researchers and decision-makers in policy and business.
This includes knowledge for understanding the climate, climate change and its impacts, as well as guidance in the use of climate knowledge.
Adaptation to climate change and disaster risk management are gradually entering the political agendas at different levels, fostering development of early climate services which need to be further settled to reach their full market potential.
Many of these services may lead to successful, but incremental improvements of local resilience through supporting the creation of adaptation management.
At the same time, we have to recognize that climate change is just one of many challenges to decision-makers many of which will lead to major transformations of the way we live, work and move around.
INNOVA explicitly wants to consider climate services innovations for transformational adaptation in addition to incremental adaptation. In this way, the impacts of the project will be more far-reaching. This includes social innovations next to technological innovations.
INNOVA augments its impacts by connecting the private, public and knowledge communities in the development of innovative climate services as climate change adaptation and disaster risk responses. We aim at co-developing advanced climate service that delineate the production, transfer, communication needs for the use of reliable climate information in order to enhance the capacity of decision-makers to deal with climate uncertainties knowledge.
INNOVA will be developed in tandem with the concept of “European Innovation Partnerships (EIP)”. This means that the following steps will be implemented in parallel to cut lead times:
INNOVA contributes in an innovative way to understanding the key role of climate services business models, in enhancing innovation, market uptake and replicability of those services. The direct engagement of a broad range of relevant stakeholders as end-users of the project that routinely co-develop climate risk management strategies in key economic sectors, will ensure the relevance and uptake of the project outputs.
The project is developed following the scientific principles of adaptive co-management. A cornerstone of adaptive co-management includes a focus on learning-by-doing, synthesis of different knowledge systems (formal and informal knowledge resources), sharing that learning and management flexibility.
These features can promote an evolving, place-specific governance approach in which strategies are sensitive to feedback (social, ecological and climatic) and oriented towards system resilience and sustainability. Adaptive co-management offers strategies that empower learners to take responsibility, to collaborate and create (Doubleday, 2008). Advantages that are claimed from these kind of innovative management approaches (Mcdaniels and Gregory, 2004; McLain and Lee, 1996; Wondolleck et al., 2002) include: