Adaptation Services Platform (AS)

Main strategic challenges

This challenge platform aims at increasing the adaptation capacity and resilience of societies, infrastructure, and cities through services and products. This is especially challenging because decision-makers – despite a general acknowledge of the potential medium to long-term importance of climate impacts for their businesses / operations – find it extremely difficult to really incorporate these factors in today’s investment decisions. This is due to the widely dispersed information, limited understanding of involved uncertainties, and the still underdeveloped expertise of translating climate data into concrete impact chains for different sectors. Whereas climate services are a rapidly emerging field strongly influenced by WMO, Climate-KIC will focus on taking this knowledge and translating it to concrete services and solutions further downstream to make a real impact. The adaptation services platform aims to support and increase the adaptation capacity and resilience of societies, infrastructure, and cities through services and products by:

• Support relevant use of climate information by society and business
• Develop services and products for various economic sectors on adaptation to climate change
• Reduce time to action on adaptation by decision makers and long term investors

Key areas to be addressed in 2013

Adaptation services is a challenging and emerging market. The key to implement and sustainably develop services and products is to valorize the unique Climate-KIC ecosystem of partnerships and to capitalize its experiences. Some institutions, within the KIC partners or not, already dominate parts of the value chain, but there is a fragmentation of these services and some have to be reinforced. Therefore the keys areas to be addressed are:

• to elaborate, test and develop services in the key areas that have well identified providers and users as well as a clear route to a substantial market (see the market analysis and innovation projects).
• to implement detailed market analysis to identify demands from new potential users and specific value chain according to the platform services.
• to identify the resources and skills that are still lacking in the value chain.

Furthermore, priority thematic flagship opportunities identified in the above section are key sectoral areas in which attention should be focused on:

• Infrastructure (energy, transport, communication)
• Coastal areas
• Flooding
• Extreme events