New special edition of Climate Services published
Special issue on European Climate Services Markets – Conditions, Challenges, Prospects, and Examples
Climate change is among the most important societal challenges of our time. Responding to this challenge requires immediate actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to the changes that are already occurring or can be expected in the next few decades.
To realize these actions, climate services are an indispensable building block for climate-informed decision-making at all levels of public administration and in private firms of all sizes. According to the European Research and Innovation Roadmap for Climate, the market for climate services has a pivotal role in increasing the resilience of the European economy as well as of societies at large by enhancing the cost-effectiveness of climate change adaptation and mitigation.
The climate service market has already developed over the past couple of years, while it is expected to have an enormous growth potential for the years ahead. In order to boost market development, it is important to better understand the nature and scope of both the demand and supply sides, and the ways they are (mis)matching, and to assess constraints and opportunities in and around these markets, so as to identify the untapped potentials and enabling conditions for further development of the market for climate services in Europe.
These questions were addressed in the two H2020 flagship projects MARCO and EU-MACS in a coherent and structured way. While MARCO focused on the climate services market characteristics and foresights into market growth, EU-MACS aimed at identifying constrains that hamper the market to unfold and enablers that support overcoming or at least diminishing the identified constraints.
The results generated in MARCO and EU-MACS are novel in terms of scale and/or scope of assessed sectors (e.g. including sectors such as mining or real estate) and applied methodologies (e.g. integrated quantitative and qualitative market assessments, business model canvas, constructive technology assessment, value chain analysis, social network analysis, policy instrument rating and packaging), which had not been applied before to climate services market assessments in a coherent setting. The same applies to a specific market foresight appraisal, in which a potential market growth is estimated.
The Special Issue is organised along three thematic areas. It starts with an overview of the market in terms of the current structure, its strengths and weaknesses. This section is followed by articles focusing on leverage points to better match supply and demand. In the final section a deeper look into some sectoral applications.
Read the "Special issue on European Climate Services Markets – Conditions, Challenges, Prospects, and Examples"