A new paper “Current uses and potential future needs for climate services in South Africa” has just been published in the journal Climate Services. The paper was authored by Darren Lumbroso, Katharine Vincent, Miriam Murambadoro, Anna Steynor, Gina Tsarouchi and Maria Nezi and was produced under the Weather and Climate Science for Service Partnership (WCSSP).
The paper provides a summary of currently available climate services in South Africa, and details the needs for new climate services, informed by primary data collection with stakeholders across the 10 priority sectors identified as part of the National Framework for Climate Services South Africa (NFCS-SA). It shows that the climate services landscape in South Africa is complex. Although a range of climate services have been produced, there remain gaps.
The development of sustainable climate services requires stakeholder engagement and an understanding of their needs. Survey and interviews with over 1000 stakeholders showed that various forms of weather and climate information are being used for planning and operational decisions. However, the accessibility of several climate services in South Africa also needs to be enhanced, especially for disadvantaged stakeholders, such as smallholders, who often do not have easy access to internet-based tools and services.
In the future, the sustainability of any new climate services developed for South Africa would be helped by being co-produced with their intended users. This presents a challenge because co-producing climate services at the same time as meeting the expanding range of demands of South African stakeholders is expensive. In South Africa, short-term projects are often used to pay for developing climate services. There is often no long-term financial support for climate services, which reduces their sustainability. In addition, the majority of South African stakeholders view weather and climate information as a public good, i.e. a service which every member of a society can freely use. This means that there is low willingness to pay. The challenge of how climate services are funded will need to be resolved if co-production of climate services in South Africa is to be improved.