Advancing future climate services: Multi-sectorial mapping of the current usage and demand in Denmark

Highlights

• Data and climate service needs vary across organizations and sectors.

• Organizations generally do not expect to create their own climate services.

• Key future demands for climate services include trust in the providers, followed by free data.

• Local data are generally preferred across survey respondents.

• Tailored and specialised products prevail among paying users as opposed to users of free data.

• Climate projections are particularly in demand from public administration and research.

Abstract

Denmark has decided to reduce its GHG emissions by 70% compared to 1990 levels by 2030, which will imply changes to technologies, economic activities and behaviour. Here alongside, climate change remains a pressing issue, requiring climate information to be integrated into current and future planned activities in order to promote effective risk-coping strategies. This study maps the current use and future demands of data and services within climate and weather across spatiotemporal scales to understand how more targeted and thus more efficient data and climate services can be developed and employed, including upscaling and wider sectoral dissemination. A key to this process is a better understanding of the needs of current and new data and climate service-users. Based on a survey, we investigate how existing and potential data and climate service-users express their need for new data, products, services and tools within the Danish Realm, including Greenland, the Faroe Islands and the Danish Oceans. The survey was distributed to existing customers of the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) through personal networks and to 31,181 entry points in the Danish Business Register forming an extensive representation within Denmark. The focal sectors include agriculture, energy (including supply), and research and consultancy regarding climate issues. Key results indicate moderate differences in data characteristics between current users of data and climate services depending on their type of organization and sector, the low demand for future data and climate services compared to their current use by respondents and, finally and crucially, trust in suppliers’ reliability.