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There is growing awareness among governments, businesses, and the general public of risks arising from changes to our climate on time scales from months through to decades. Some climatic changes could be unprecedented in their harmful socioeconomic impacts, while others with adequate forewarning and planning could offer benefits. There is therefore a pressing need for decision-makers, including policy-makers, to have access to and to use high-quality, accessible, relevant, and credible climate information about the past, present, and future to help make better-informed decisions and policies. We refer to the provision and use of such information as climate services. Established programs of research and operational activities are improving observations and climate monitoring, our understanding of climate processes, climate variability and change, and predictions and projections of the future climate. Delivering climate information (including data and knowledge) in a way that is usable and useful for decision-makers has had less attention, and society has yet to optimally benefit from the available information. While weather services routinely help weather-sensitive decision-making, similar services for decisions on longer time scales are less well established. Many organizations are now actively developing climate services, and a growing number of decision-makers are keen to benefit from such services. This article describes progress made over the past decade developing, delivering, and using climate services, in particular from the worldwide effort galvanizing around the Global Framework for Climate Services under the coordination of UN agencies. The article highlights challenges in making further progress and proposes potential new directions to address such challenges.

Adaptation to anthropogenic climate change is the biggest challenge that humankind faces. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) provides a synthesis of the state of the science, impacts, and policy, with a focus on long-term climate trends. However, the worst impacts of climate change are likely to come from its exacerbation of weather and climate variability. For example, higher temperatures in a particular region could lead to harsher droughts and more deadly heat waves. These are also the kinds of hazards that are regularly monitored and forecast by governments and institutions at the national, regional, and international scale. This paper argues that climate services are a critical component of adaptation. Communities that benefit from climate services will be better adapted to long-term climate change as well as the weather events and the year to-year variability it could make worse. Climate services involve the production, translation, transfer, and use of climate knowledge and information in relevant decision-making, policy and planninga. They involve far more than climate data, encompassing an understanding of the needs of decision makers and delivering useful information in ways it can be applied for better results. A well-functioning climate service can help decision-makers understand, anticipate, and manage climate-related risks across the range of relevant time scales, from days to decades, much in the way a national meteorological service (NMS) does for weather. Yet, in most of the world, climate services are not sufficiently developed, nor are they properly aligned with the needs of decision-makers in the sectors and systems that are most at risk. The urgency of the climate challenge calls for a critical examination of the current state of climate services relative to the needs of decision-makers; it also requires aggressive action to address long-standing obstacles to meeting those needs. While several decades of research, investment, and implementation provide a strong foundation for climate services, more deliberate action is needed to position climate services as essential to adaptation.