Climate Services for Improving Society's Resilience in China

Abstract

<p><strong>ABSTRACT</strong></p><p>  With global warming and fast urbanization in China, more and more climate services are urgently needed to manage climate-related disasters better, adapt to a changing climate, and ensure sustainable economic development for improving climate-related society’s resilience. This paper describes the current primary needs for climate services and introduces a series of examples of climate services successfully provided to agriculture, water, energy, urban planning, major engineering projects and ecological economy in China.</p><p>These examples of climate services indicate that climate services play a very important role for improving climate-related resilience and sustainable development of society. During the development and implementation of these climate services, both benefits of climate services and some challenges for climate services have been found. The paper highlights the experiences and challenges of these climate services as following:</p><p>Firstly, climate services should be tailored to each user individually and be usable. Therefore, providers of climate services should enhance service capability and service consciousness. Secondly, building of interdisciplinary expert team is very important. It can bridge and narrow the gaps in whole climate service chain. Thirdly, climate service quality, observation network, spatial and temporal resolution of climate model and climate prediction accuracy need to be greatly improved. Finally, the feedback of climate service from users is also very important for high efficiency of climate services.</p>