Identifying climate information services users and their needs in Sub-Saharan Africa: a review and learning agenda

ABSTRACT

Climate information services (CIS) involve the production, translation, transfer, and use of climate information for individual and societal decision-making. After years of focus on building CIS around available information, today the CIS community recognizes that effective CIS are aimed at specific users of the service and their particular needs. In this review, we describe practical experiences identifying CIS users and their needs, showing different approaches, assumptions, and levels of empirical support. Our uneven and limited understanding of users and their needs presents four key challenges for climate services: (1) designing effective assessments of users and their needs, (2) identifying and overcoming barriers to CIS use, (3) scaling up a CIS and (4) the cross-cutting challenge of dealing with changing conditions and changing user knowledge. Reviewing project and academic literature on CIS in sub-Saharan Africa, we assess what is known and not known relating to these challenges. We prioritize identified gaps in knowledge into a learning agenda to organize learning from practice and research such that both serve a range of needs for knowledge about users and their needs, speak to current ‘good practices’ in CIS design, management, and evaluation, and point the way to better practices in the future.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate information services
• adaptation
• users
• needs
• Africa
• learning agenda

Acknowledgements

The authors wish to thank two peer reviewers and several members of the Climate Information Services Research Initiative (CISRI) consortium for comments and suggestions that improved various versions of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Edward R. Carr is a Professor and Director of the International Development, Community, and Environment Department at Clark University. He is also the director of the Humanitarian Response and Development Lab (HURDL) at Clark. His work focuses on livelihoods, adaptation, and resilience in the context of global development.

Rob Goble is Research Professor of Environmental Science and Policy in the International Development, Community, and Environment Department at Clark University, and is also a member and former director of the George Perkins Marsh Institute at Clark. His interests lie in risk and uncertainty perspectives pertaining to human engagement in complex systems, global development settings, and community participation.

Helen M. Rosko is a PhD Candidate in the Graduate School of Geography at Clark University. She is also a research assistant in the Humanitarian Response and Development Lab (HURDL) at Clark. Her work focuses on climate adaptation, livelihoods, and international development in West Africa.

Cathy Vaughan is a senior staff associate at the International Research Institute for Climate & Society. Her work focuses on climate service evaluation and the institutional arrangements that support climate service use.

James Hansen is a Senior Research Scientist at the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI), Columbia University; and Flagship Leader, Climate Services and Safety Nets for the CGIAR research program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). His work focuses on climate risk management and climate services for agriculture in the developing world.

ORCID

Edward R. Carr http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7784-471X

Additional information

Funding

The data reported in this article was gathered and analyzed as part of the Learning Agenda on Climate Services in Sub-Saharan Africa: Climate Information Services Research Initiative (CISRI) supported by the Office of Sustainable Development, Bureau for Africa, U.S. Agency for International Development, under the terms of Cooperative Agreement No. AID-OAA-A-16-00072, CFDA # 98.001 .