The need for non-climate services – Empirical evidence from Finnish municipalities

Abstract

There is a call for climate services to facilitate climate risk assessment and management. Local governments are major actors in managing climate risk but there is less research on what kind of information is needed and used by municipalities. With the help of a quantitative survey and a post-survey workshop, we analyze the status of climate risk assessment and management in Finnish municipalities, evaluating key information sources and assessing the main barriers to climate risk work. Our results show that municipalities have generally been slow in implementing climate risk management, and that has mostly been concentrated on managing flood risks. They use and need various sources of information, such as experts, a range of networks, as well as data and tools related to climate and weather. Those municipalities that have been more active in climate risk management consider public sector experts and networks to be more important than do less active municipalities. There are significant barriers to managing climate risk, which include the usability of climate information and a lack of such information, a lack of resources, institutional arrangements and constraints both within municipalities and between municipalities and other organizations. In particular, those municipalities that have been less active in climate risk management need more networking, strengthening of their capacity and know-how to assess and manage climate risks as well as access to usable information, whereas more active municipalities are more readily able to digest climate information. We discuss how climate risk management could be linked to overall risk management in municipalities and how networks of municipalities could facilitate climate risk management. Finally, our results imply that, in addition to climate services, those less active municipalities in particular need non-climate services, i.e. services that explain how to use information that is not directly related to climate.