Focused business models and open-data policies are key to accelerating uptake of climate services The EU-funded EU-MACS project assessed barriers to the uptake of climate services across a wide variety of sectors in Member States, businesses and not-for-profit organisations. Climate Change and Environment © TierneyMJ, Shutterstock Focusing mainly on finance, tourism and urban planning, EU-MACS project partners examined the structures and interactions of the different obstacles to the uptake of climate services, aiming to improve the design of policy scenarios and selection of appropriate policy instruments. They discovered that public and not-for-profit climate service providers need to better plan and evaluate their positions in the climate service value chain and adopt improved business models with a focus on collaborative needs-based climate services. In addition, an open-data policy at EU and Member State levels is a key element for a flourishing climate services market. Application of the project’s proposed policy packages in EU Member States, supported by EU-level initiatives on standardisation and market deployment monitoring, should accelerate the uptake and beneficial use of climate services across many sectors. “We loosely estimate that if the additional uptake of climate services takes place across the entire EU, this would represent easily a net societal benefit of several billion euro, as well as non-monetised benefits for societal resilience,” says project coordinator Adriaan Perrels of the Finnish Meteorological Institute. Keywords climate services, finance, tourism, urban planning, policy
