Fourth International Conference on Climate Services
The Climate Services Partnership is pleased to announce the fourth International Conference on Climate Services (ICCS 4), which will be held in Montevideo, Uruguay. The event starts this Wednesday, December 10 at 10:30 am UTC and runs through Friday, December 12, 2:30 pm UTC.
ICCS 4 is being hosted by the Uruguayan Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries, with support from the World Bank, the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security and a host of other local and international organizations. The conference is convened by the Climate Services Partnership, an informal network that works to advance the provision and delivery of climate services around the world.
The three-day meeting will explore the theme of climate-informed decision support tools and a range of other topics, including health, water, disasters, grassland management and the evaluation of climate services.
Decision support systems
While climate affects all aspects of life, the decisions we make are rarely based entirely, or even predominantly, on climate information. Rather, a range of factors must be considered as we make plans that shape our countries, companies and communities. Decision-support systems offer a way to meet this complex challenge–combining different kinds of information into a single framework and assisting decision makers by supporting, rather than replacing, their judgement.
By contextualizing climate information within this framework, decision-support systems can help us apply climate information to pressing real-world problems. But while decision-support systems have shown to be useful in advancing climate risk management, many questions remain, including what sorts of questions are these systems best suited for? How can we design them to best communicate uncertainty, and to what extent can they be linked to national-level policy decisions? These and other questions will be explored during ICCS4.
More than 180 participants from 31 countries will attend the conference. They will take part in 28 parallel sessions that will feature more than 100 speakers. Topics include: data-driven climate services; innovative solutions to decision support; institutional arrangements to support climate services; climate service ethics; climate services and partnerships in Small Island Developing States; the economic valuation of climate services.