Climateurope Festival 2017: climate information at your service
The Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS) together with the partners of of the Climateurope project (www.climateurope.eu) organized the first Climateurope Festival. It took place from 5th to 7th April 2017 in Valencia. The key objective of the Festival was to discuss the advantages and challenges that climate services face within the sectors of water, ecosystems, food production and food security.
Within the project two Festivals are still planned to create synergies between different European, national and international initiatives in the fields of earth-system modelling and climate services and enhance the transfer of information between suppliers and users.
Over 80 participants from 17 European countries and Canada attended the Climateurope Festival 2017. This event brought together scientific community, users and providers of climate services and funding bodies. The world leading international water and wastewater company SUEZ together with a number of innovative small and medium-sized enterprises and start-ups were invited to make their business-case in climate services visible.
The Festival applied different formats from traditional frontal impulse talks to innovative interactive sessions, e.g. a storytelling session, speed networking and a market place (see photo 'market place' in the gallery).
This gave the participants the opportunity to share their experience and knowledge on how climate services are already being offered successfully and identify the needs for improvement, in order to deliver climate services better or more efficiently (see cartoon 2 in the gallery). Speed networking facilitated cooperation between different European projects and initiatives (see cartoon 3 in the gallery). The session at Valencia’s Albufera Nature Park gave the valuable insights into ecosystem services (see photo 'Albufera' in the gallery).
Two creative and inspiring presentations highlighted how to tell the story of climate change visually and how to give a talk that will be remembered. They aimed at helping the scientists to improve the methods of the scientific results dissemination (see photo 'session' in the gallery).
At Climate Snack a few relevant talks on latest research were delivered. They dealt with a particular “crop” or “food ingredient” that might be affected by climate change and for the production of which might become challenging (see photo 'climate snack' in the gallery).
We are convinced that the First Climateurope Festival has created new networks and inspired existing ones to support climate services at the European and national levels.