Identifying tools and methods to co-create a climate risk service for managing drought risk in Austria (CRiSDA)

© CRiSDA project team

In CRiSDA we will employ a climate risk perspective to climate services, in order to lay the foundations for a climate risk service for droughts (see Fig). This aims to be beneficial at the intersection of Disaster Risk Management (DRM) and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA), and it systemically considers all three components of climate risk (see Fig). A comprehensive climate risk service is not only a novel approach to bridge the gaps between CCA and DRM in practice but also instrumental along the whole CRM cycle (see Schinko et al. 2017, Leitner et al. 2020) for the Austrian context, which is supported by other international findings (e.g. Räsänen et al. 2017). Building on experiences from other contexts, e.g. early warning systems (e.g. Preuner et al. 2017), one potential way forward to close the science-policy gap and turn towards demand-driven approaches is the use of stakeholder-driven, participatory co-creation approaches. The advantages of employing such approaches for developing cli-mate risk services include the potential for providers of services to tailor information to users’ specific contexts and needs within inclusive co-design processes (Hewitt et al. 2017, Palutikof et al. 2019). Consequently, a facilitated, online co-creation workshop with key stakeholders and potential end-users was already held on 15 January 2021, during the proposal stage. This open dialogue supported the identification of requirements of users and the joint development of objectives of CRiSDA, and reflected the starting point of the comprehensive co-creation process that will be coordinated by EQU researchers Alberto Fresolone, Thomas Schinko, and Thomas Thaler throughout the two-year project.