MARCO PROJECT
Market research for a Climate Services Observatory
Go to marco website
EU-MACS Coordinator: Prof. Adriaan Perrels, forename.surname@fmi.fi
HZG | Germany
The Climate Service Center Germany (GERICS) is an independent scientific entity at Helmholtz-Zentrum Geesthacht, Zentrum für Material- und Küstenforschung GmbH (HZG). HZG is one of 18 members of the Helmholtz Association of German Research Centres, Germany’s largest science organization. HZG is located in Geesthacht near Hamburg with branches in Teltow near Berlin and in Hamburg, with a total staff of approximately 900 employees, including about 650 scientists, engineers and technicians.
GERICS / HZG is among the leading experts in the field of climate services in Europe and will bring this expertise from the cutting edge of the field to the use of the project. HZG will contribute to the work packages WP1, WP4, WP5 and WP6. Highest contribution of HZG is in WP1 in which it has a co-leading role.
Dr. Jörg Cortekar graduated in Economics and received his PhD in Environmental Economics in 2007 from the University of Goettingen. In the following years Jörg Cortekar worked in the field of water management with a focus on the economic requirements according to EU legislation, which includes e.g. cost-benefit-analysis, opportunity cost approaches and many more. Most of the work was carried out to inform policy makers. In 2013 Jörg joined the Climate Service Center team to work on JPI Climate activities, i.e. stakeholder consultations (providers and users of climate services). He did similar studies on user requirements and climate services providers in Belgium and the Philippines (study commissioned by the GIZ). Currently, he works on costs and benefits of climate services and the integration of climate models and economic approaches.
Cortekar, J., Máñez, M., Zölch, T. (2014) Klimadienstleistungen in Deutschland – Eine Analyse der Anbieter und Anwender, CSC Report 16, Climate Service Center, Germany, see: http://www.climate-service-center.de/imperia/md/content/csc/csc_report16.pdf
Manez M., Zölch T., Cortekar J. (2014) Mapping of Climate Service Providers – Theoretical Foundation and Empirical Results: A German Case Study, CSC Report 15, at http://www.climate-service-center.de/imperia/md/content/csc/csc_report15.pdf
Weber, B. (2013) Report on a web-document presenting the different initiatives towards Climate Services in the world, ECLISE, Del. 7.1., http://www.eclise-project.eu/content/mm_files/do_830/D7.1_ECLISE.pdf
Cortekar, J., Groth, M. (2015) Adapting energy infrastructure to climate change – Is there a need for government interventions and legal obligations within the German “Energiewende”?. In: Energy Procedia. Vol. 73, pp. 12 – 17. (DOI: 10.1016/j.egypro.2015.07.552)
Koldunov, N.V., Kumar, P., Rasmussen, R., Ramanathan, A.L., Nesje, A., Engelhardt, M., Tiwari, M., Haensler, A., Jacob, D. (2015) Identifying climate change information needs for the Himalaya region – Results from the GLACINDIA Stakeholder Workshop and Training Program. In: Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. (DOI: 10.1175/BAMS-D-15-00160.1)
A web-based service for climate service users to get an overview about potential providers. This A map and navigator of climate service providers was developed together with the Austrian Center for Climate Services: http://www.climate-knowledge-hub.org
H2020 IMPREX (2015 – 2019) IMproving PRedictions and management of hydrological Extremes, IMPREX will improve forecast skill of meteorological and hydrological extremes in Europe and their impacts. The project outreach maximizes the legacy impact of the surveys, aimed at European public stakeholder and business networks, including user-friendly assessment summaries, and training material. With its integrative approach, IMPREX will link current management decisions and actions with an emergent future. GERICS leads the work package “Sectoral integration and climate services”.
FP7 ECLISE, Enabling CLimate Information Services for Europe (2011-2013) is a European effort in which researchers, in close cooperation with users, develop and demonstrate local climate services to support climate adaptation policies. It does so by providing climate services for several climate-vulnerable regions in Europe, organized at a sectorial level: coastal defence, cities, water resources and energy production.
FP7 CLIPC Climate Information Platform for Copernicus (2013-2016) This project is one of the Copernicus Climate Change Service Precursor Projects. GERICS is leading the development of an uncertainty assessment for the climate change impact indicators and the underlying climate data. The continuous user consultation is a key component of CLIPC to develop a user-oriented portal. GERICS contributes by determining the requirements of different potential user groups for the data access platform, the climate impacts toolkit and the visualization on the portal through consultation
JPI Climate (Joint Programming initiatives Climate) (2013 – 2014) GERICS participates in module 2 – Researching Climate Service Development and Deployment. Within this module, GERICS coordinated the Fast Track Activity (FTA) 2.2 and substantially contributed to Fast Track Activity 2.1. Both activities were part of an FP7 funded coordination and support action. The main goal of FTA 2.2 was the development of a common methodology to analyse providers of climate services and its application. The methodology combines deskwork, surveys and interviews. FTA 2.1 includes a users’ needs assessment, which was based on existing literature and, in Germany, workshops and semi-structured interviews.
Stadtbaukasten (GERICS Initiative) – Cities need tailored information, guidance and moderation through the whole process starting with an inventory, stakeholder consultation, planning, implementation and monitoring.
Relevant infrastructure:
GERICS has an excellent infrastructure aimed at supporting decision makers in enhancing their knowledge in the fields of climate change, its impacts and adaptation options. This includes not only the interdisciplinary team of GERICS but also the many national and international networks such as the JPI Climate, Climate Services Partnership (GERICS is hosting the office), ClimatEurope, EUROCORDEX (co-lead) and Klimanavigator.de
HZG owns the dedicated blade server eddy (located at DKRZ, the German Climate Computing Center) including large data storage capacities used to process and prepare data for product development and operationalization. In addition, local computing facilities equipped with dedicated licensed software are used for visualization.
