Applying Climate Services to Transformative Adaptation in Agriculture

Abstract

As climate change increasingly affects agriculture around the world, reliable, timely, and targeted information about weather and climate conditions is becoming an ever more urgent requirement for adaptation decision-making. This paper considers how transformative adaptation – long-term, systemic change to fundamental aspects of systems in response to or anticipation of severe climate change impacts - could be accelerated by enhancing climate services and how they are applied. The paper explores how components of climate services – defined as systems to develop and provide climate information to meet users’ needs - could be enhanced for building and implementing transformative pathways. It looks at current challenges and opportunities in climate service design and suggests how different types of information and data can be used to better integrate climate services into adaptation and development plans for systemic change. The paper concludes by providing recommendations for researchers, policymakers, and adaptation funding entities.