Climate Change Scenario Services: From Science to Facilitating Action

An important gap in climate change scenario research is addressed by this Perspective piece: it presents a comprehensive service concept to make climate change scenarios accessible and actionable for key actors of climate neutrality.
Despite the development of a range of climate services, climate change scenarios (climate change, impact, mitigation and adaptation) were not adequately covered up to now.
Heightened interest from actors outside the traditional user group of policy makers, for example from the private sector and in particular the finance sector has even increased the need for such services.

This novel concept is of significance to all scientists and decision makers that see the urgency for a concerted transformation towards climate neutrality.
Climate change scenarios can be an enabler of this process and a service concept is overdue to lift their richness onto an accessible level for a broad spectrum of key actors.

A vision and a concrete realization showcase how user needs can be put into the center to make an equally complex but rich scientific resource like climate change scenarios accessible for actors outside academia
The wide-ranging service concept presents six essential properties to make climate change scenarios a salient, credible, and legitimate scientific source for a broader user group.
Further, the authors also present the SENSES toolkit, which implements central components of the wide-ranging service concept.
The toolkit focuses on mitigation scenarios, as these are strongly under-represented in the arena of climate services, but also contain material for impact projections and adaptation scenarios.

Link to publication
https://www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(21)00416-4

Video explaining SENSES Toolkit
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sw9FtJ4N1Lw

SENSES Toolkit
https://climatescenarios.org/toolkit/