*Article* **When Do Climate Services Achieve Societal Impact? Evaluations of Actionable Climate Adaptation Science**

**Aparna Bamzai-Dodson 1,2,\* and Renee A. McPherson 2,3**


**Abstract:** To cope with complex environmental impacts in a changing climate, researchers are increasingly being asked to produce science that can directly support policy and decision making. To achieve such societal impact, scientists are using climate services to engage directly with stakeholders to better understand their needs and inform knowledge production. However, the wide variety of climate-services outcomes—ranging from establishing collegial relationships with stakeholders to obtaining specific information for inclusion into a pre-existing decision process—do not directly connect to traditional methods of measuring scientific impact (e.g., publication citations, journal impact factor). In this paper, we describe how concepts from the discipline of evaluation can be used to examine the societal impacts of climate services. We also present a case study from climate impacts and adaptation research to test a scalable evaluation approach. Those who conduct research for the purposes of climate services and those who fund applied climate research would benefit from evaluation from the beginning of project development. Doing so will help ensure that the approach, data collection, and data analysis are appropriately conceived and executed.

**Keywords:** climate change; climate services; adaptation; actionable science; stakeholder engagement; societal impact; evaluation

### **1. Introduction**

### *1.1. Background*

The defining characteristic of the past century is the impact of human activities on environmental systems, such as global climate change [1,2], that result in challenging and uncertain policy and decision contexts. To support policy and decision making, scientists are being asked to provide climate services—the provision of timely climate data and information created in a form that is useful, usable, and used (i.e., actionable) [3,4]. To generate such climate services, scientists are interacting "out in the world" with information endusers, known more broadly as stakeholder engagement [5,6]. Engagement of stakeholders in research projects has a demonstrated positive impact on subsequent information use for decision making [7]. However, traditional definitions of research success most often focus on agency or academic metrics, such as number of publications and citation metrics [8,9], and do not capture societal impacts well [10,11].

Defining success for societal impact can be challenging because the needs of stakeholders can vary from learning how to work collaboratively with researchers (collegial engagement) to being generally better informed (conceptual information use) to taking specific on-the-ground action (instrumental information use) [12,13]. Additionally, climate service providers have a wide range of engagement approaches available to them to meet these varying needs—spanning from informing stakeholders of results to empowering

**Citation:** Bamzai-Dodson, A.; McPherson, R.A. When Do Climate Services Achieve Societal Impact? Evaluations of Actionable Climate Adaptation Science. *Sustainability* **2022**, *14*, 14026. https://doi.org/ 10.3390/su142114026

Academic Editors: Charles Herrick, Jason Vogel and Glen Anderson

Received: 26 August 2022 Accepted: 26 October 2022 Published: 28 October 2022

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

them as co-equal project investigators [14]. To accommodate this diverse range of engagement needs and approaches, evaluation processes need to be specifically tailored to examine the impact and actionability of such information to a community [15,16].

In this paper, we introduce concepts from the field of evaluation and describe how they may be used to help define indicators for and evaluate the societal impacts of climate services. We focus on climate impacts and adaptation research, as it is one area where the provision of climate services is growing at a rapid pace. We present results from a case study application of these concepts to research funded by the U.S. Geological Survey Climate Adaptation Science Center network and discuss how these findings can be further developed. The deliberate consideration of success and explicit attention to evaluation can improve the actionability of science.

### *1.2. Evaluation Theory and Practice*

Evaluation helps individuals and organizations learn and improve program operations by testing the effectiveness of or changes in activities; it differs from assessment, which is intended to grade or score performance [17,18]. The field of evaluation uses several different theoretical approaches and methods for operationalization. It has a rich set of literature that differentiates between the advantages and limitations of these approaches and techniques and identifies the appropriate contexts for their use [19–21]. Therefore, no matter the context, it is incumbent upon the evaluator to initially determine the kind of evaluation required and ensure that they draw upon the appropriate best practices when designing the evaluation process.

Figure 1 summarizes a few key concepts from the discipline of evaluation for consideration when designing and conducting an evaluation of climate services. Evaluations benefit from beginning with an appraisal of the following: (1) what it is that specifically needs to be evaluated (the evaluand), (2) what aspects of the evaluand (process, outputs, or outcomes) are most appropriate for evaluation, and (3) when (summatively or formatively) and at what organizational scale (program or project) the evaluation will be conducted [22,23]. As part of this appraisal, the evaluator identifies the purpose of the evaluation, inputs to the activity, and other contextual factors, such as the level of analysis or precision [22,23]. Once the approach and method are identified, the evaluator selects suitable variables for measurement and analysis. These variables cover necessary aspects of the evaluand that are to be evaluated, while also being scientifically sound (e.g., measured reliably, scaled appropriately) [22,23]. If the approach is quantitative or mixed-methods, then the evaluator also ensures that statistical assumptions and analyses are logically sound and allow sufficient statistical power.

These approaches intersect in layered ways when operationalized, and an evaluator can make intentional selections among them to meet the goals of the evaluation. For example, to enhance the investment of public funding for climate services, an evaluator may elect to conduct a formative evaluation of processes at the program level. This approach would help the funding program iteratively improve funding opportunities, proposal reviews, and project management to increase alignment with the overall goal of use of information for policy and decision making. In contrast, to improve their understanding of the operational practices necessary for successful delivery of climate services and pitfalls to avoid, an evaluator may instead elect to conduct a summative evaluation of project outputs and outcomes. Traditionally, evaluation of climate impacts and adaptation research has occurred in an ad hoc summative manner that has not been robustly informed by evaluation theory and practice, although resources are emerging to help climate service providers bridge this gap [8].

**Figure 1.** Evaluation key concepts relevant to what specific aspects of an activity require evaluation, when the evaluation will occur, and at what organizational scale it will take place [22,23].

### *1.3. Success and Evaluation for Climate Services*

Here, we present some applications of evaluation to better understand the societal impact of climate services. Several traditional models and mechanisms are available for gathering quantitative measures of scientific impact, including research inputs such as the amount of funding obtained and research outputs such as the number of publications, their associated journal impact factor, and number of citations [24] or the number of downloads of products from websites [25]. However, none of these measures identifies whether or how the stakeholder used the information to make a decision because knowledge delivery does not equal knowledge use [11]. To evaluate climate services, an evaluator can focus on stakeholder perception of the process (e.g., workshop evaluations) or, more important to actionability, how well stakeholder input increases the usability. Even better, the evaluation can examine the actual use of the research outputs.

In practice, evaluating information usability and use by policy and decision makers is notoriously difficult. Wall et al. [26] provide an initial direction for evaluating the societal impacts of climate services, such as if agencies and managers find the science credible and if the findings are explicitly applied in agency planning, resource allocation, or a policy decision. McNie [27] suggests other options, such as evaluating whether "all relevant information was considered" or "whether the science was understood and interpreted correctly". Quantifying these impact metrics is difficult, but options include conducting follow-up interviews with decision makers engaged in projects [28] and analyzing the language in plans and decisions [29].

More nuanced approaches to incorporating perspectives from stakeholders require deeper engagement and focus primarily on understanding how the stakeholder experienced or perceived the engagement. These approaches can include examining factors such as the following: (1) the time required to build the relationship, (2) an understanding of how the project might influence the person or their community, and (3) the nature of the interactions between scientists and users, including building trust [30,31]. Data collection may include surveys (particularly those using open-ended questions that allow people to describe what they experienced or why they hold a certain view) or semi-structured interviews. The iterative nature of some stakeholder engagement in climate services means formative evaluation is possible through using longitudinal evaluation designs. For example, the same survey can be administered multiple times during the development of a decision support tool to ensure that updates to the tool enhance usability [32].

In situations where stakeholder engagement yields neither scientific nor societal impact, success may be defined in more intangible ways, including the depth of integration of stakeholders into the investigator team and their satisfaction with the process [26]. Here, methods for evaluation can focus on identifying and monitoring measurable outcomes on intermediary time scales. For example, a project team can design a conceptual logic model that captures stakeholder impact as a long-term outcome and identifies how to measure change at interim checkpoints [33]. Or the team can apply a theory of change-based framework where establishing and maintaining relationships are key social learning outcomes for an entire community of practice [34]. Regardless of the approach selected, thinking strategically about evaluation from the front-end of a project ensures that appropriate information is collected throughout to monitor whether goals are being achieved and take corrective actions as needed.

### **2. Case Study**

In this paper, we share case study data and results to demonstrate how a climate services boundary organization with the goal of funding the production of actionable science examined its projects to understand their societal impact. This work is part of a broader evaluation of climate impacts and adaptation research projects funded by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) South Central and North Central Climate Adaptation Science Centers (CASCs), two regional centers within a nationwide network (Figure 2). Our thoughts on the strengths and weaknesses of the selected evaluation methods and results are included in the Discussion to aid other climate services organizations in their evaluation planning efforts.

**Figure 2.** Map of the National and Regional Climate Adaptation Science Centers (CASCs). This analysis focuses on projects funded by the North Central and South Central CASCs.

The CASC network was established by the U.S. Department of the Interior to "provide climate change impact data and analysis geared to the needs of fish and wildlife managers as they develop adaptation strategies in response to climate change" [35]. To achieve this mission, CASC project solicitations are intended to fund research that creates products and tools that directly support resource managers in their development and implementation of climate adaptation plans and actions. Although funded projects are usually research activities of two to three years in length, this emphasis on research use means that they also result in the provision of climate services and can generate partnerships that last beyond the length of an individual project. Examples of climate services activities from prior funded projects include (1) researchers and Tribal water managers working together to better understand micro-drought onset conditions to inform drought adaptation planning, (2) scientific synthesis of information on future fire regimes delivered to managers via training, and (3) the implementation by researchers of small-scale adaptation demonstration projects to illustrate the retention of water on the landscape to resource managers.

From 2013 to 2016, the CASC network was guided by the Federal Advisory Committee on Climate Change and Natural Resource Science, which produced a report providing recommendations on how to improve operations [36]. A key recommendation in this report was for USGS to develop an evaluation process to ensure that programmatic activities and funded projects align with the mission [36]. Suggested evaluation categories include "relevance, quality, processes, accessibility, and impact of science products and services", although no framework or method for implementing this evaluation process was provided [36]. USGS headquarters conducts annual internal and five-year external program-level reviews of the regional centers to examine overall operations and impact [37] but does not pursue project-level evaluation. As a result, regional CASCs are developing and piloting their own supplemental project evaluation processes.

The broader evaluation of South Central and North Central CASC projects included an analysis of project documentation, a survey of stakeholders engaged in the projects, and a focused set of interviews with highly engaged stakeholders. This paper focuses on the survey, which was intended to provide a summative project-level evaluation of process, outputs and outcomes, and broader impacts based on the perspectives of stakeholders. This approach was chosen because formative evaluation was not a consideration in the development of the funding program. Furthermore, enough time had elapsed that multiple years of projects had reached completion. Our expectation was that evaluation of the entire suite of projects by the program office would provide us with sufficient data to compare characteristics between dissimilar types of projects (e.g., projects carried out at local scales in comparison to projects to create data at broad regional scales). We used an electronic survey of project stakeholders because it was a no-cost option; no resources other than limited staff capacity were dedicated to this evaluation effort. These limitations are commonplace in federal science programs, making this case a suitable proxy for conditions faced by other funders of climate services.

### **3. Methods**

We contacted the primary investigators for 28 South Central CASC projects and 16 North Central CASC projects to identify the stakeholders whom they engaged during the project, resulting in a total of 186 unique contacts for the South Central CASC and 188 unique contacts for the North Central CASC. All contacts were invited via email from the research team to complete the survey, the protocol for which is publicly available from Bamzai-Dodson et al. [38] and the design for which is based on published indicators of usable science [26]. Institutional Review Board (IRB) approval was obtained via The University of Oklahoma (IRB number 7457). Paperwork Reduction Act approval was obtained from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (control number 1090-0011).

The survey was divided into four sections: process, outputs and outcomes, impacts, and demographics. The survey protocol was pre-tested by 20 staff from across the nationwide CASC network, and their feedback was incorporated into the final form. Six questions asked respondents about the process of creating new knowledge together among investigators, resource managers, and decision makers, focusing on the nature and timing of interactions. Nine questions asked respondents about perceptions of the products developed through this project, including factors that promoted or limited their use by the individual or their agency. Six questions asked respondents about their partnership with the investigators, including what made it likely or unlikely for them to work together again. Four questions asked respondents for demographic information, such as the geography, sector, and professional role that they worked in. Questions were a mix of multiple choice, Likert scale, open-ended, and matrix table, based on accepted practices for effective survey design [39,40].

Survey dissemination and collection of responses was carried out electronically using Qualtrics [41], with a release date of 7 December 2018 and a 90-day dissemination window. Data collection was hampered due to the U.S. federal government shutdown from 22 December 2018 to 25 January 2019. Federal contacts were re-invited on 1 July 2019 to take the survey during a second 90-day dissemination window, but response rates remained low. Table 1 provides the response rate information per region, and Table 2 summarizes the demographics of respondents. All survey questions were optional to complete, so the total responses per question does not always equal the total number of complete responses (49). A public summary of the survey results is published in Bamzai-Dodson et al. [42].

**Table 1.** Survey response rates for each Climate Adaptation Science Center (CASC) region.


**Table 2.** Respondent demographics for both CASC regions by organization type and organizational role. "Other" self-identified as part of a "federally supported partnership".


### **4. Results**

### *4.1. Process: Engagement in the Process of Knowledge Production*

Questions in this section of the survey were designed to examine the nature and focus of interactions between stakeholders and investigators during the process of knowledge production. Research indicates that when, how, and how often scientists and stakeholders interact with each other during a project can be important factors to the perceived success of the project [26]. More than half of the respondents (57.1 percent) indicated their engagement began prior to proposal development, with an additional 12.2 percent engaged during proposal development. Engagement during a project ranged from never (zero times per year) to at least every week (52 or more times per year), although most respondents (67.4 percent) were engaged between one to eight times per year. No respondents said that the level of interaction was too much; however, 16 percent said that there was too little interaction. These results indicate that early and ongoing interactions were common factors in CASC projects and that even high frequency engagement was not perceived as too much interaction by stakeholders. One respondent described their experience being engaged in a project late and expressed appreciation for the investigators' responsiveness to their input: "The investigative team was slow to involve those of us who were able to provide more local expertise into the design process, however they did exhibit remarkable flexibility in inviting/allowing that input and then adapting their process to better include such material/knowledge".

The phases of a project during which the most stakeholders reported interaction were definition of the problem (87.5 percent), selection of products (85.7 percent), and dissemination of findings (87 percent). No interaction was most often reported by stakeholders during the design of research methods (27.1 percent), the collection of project data (27.1 percent), and the analysis of project data (32.6 percent). Only one respondent (3.85 percent) indicated that a formal needs assessment was done as part of the project, and 10 respondents (38.5 percent) indicated that needs were determined through informal conversation. Eleven respondents (23.4 percent) indicated that a formal risk or vulnerability assessment was conducted, and 18 respondents (38.3 percent) indicated that risk or vulnerability were assessed through informal conversation. These findings indicate that stakeholders are primarily engaging in CASC projects at key decision points related to the context, scoping, and products of a project and not when decisions such as method selection, data collection, and data analysis are made about research design. CASC project teams are also preferentially choosing to use informal approaches when determining the management context of a research project instead of following established formal strategies for assessing needs, risk, or vulnerability (e.g., scenario planning, structured decision making, systems engineering).

The responses to these questions were informative for describing the frequency, timing, and intent of engagement. However, we found that our evaluation and survey design missed identifying who had initiated each stage of engagement, evaluating the perceived quality of interactions at those points, understanding why engagement was lower during design decisions, and whether a lack of engagement at those points was detrimental to project outcomes. One possibility is for funding programs or climate service providers to identify key decision points regarding the formation of research goals and questions and the development and dissemination of products during which the quality and outcomes of the engagement process can be evaluated in an ongoing manner. Such an approach would strengthen the alignment between stakeholder aspirations, priorities, and needs and project goals, outputs, and outcomes.

### *4.2. Outputs and Outcomes: Production and Use of Outputs*

Questions in this section of the survey were designed to determine the types of outputs and knowledge produced by projects and understand how they were used by stakeholders. Research indicates that the number, type, quality, usability, and use of outputs from projects can be important factors to the perceived success of the project [26]. The most common project output reported by respondents was data provision, ranging from disseminating observations (e.g., place-based phenological data) to projections (e.g., climate model data) (Figure 3). Respondents also reported receiving summarized information from investigators, such as two-page overviews of new findings and quarterly newsletters. Notably, some respondents remarked on more subtle relational outcomes such as "many relationships" and "a new world view". One respondent provided the following feedback on the networking opportunities that their project provided: "The most fruitful and beneficial outcomes from this project will be the connections established between collaborators. It is difficult to quantify [the potential outcomes of new relationships] but I think bringing people to the table is, nonetheless, extremely valuable and worth supporting".

All respondents indicated that projects helped them both be better informed broadly about an issue and be better informed specifically about a particular problem. However, stakeholders indicated that projects were not useful to gain a new technical skill (25.8 percent), formulate policy (23.8 percent), and implement adaptation plans (13 percent). Respondents indicated that projects helped them to understand changes in weather and climate observations and model projections and to link those changes to impacts on resources or places that they manage; however, no respondents indicated that projects helped them identify, evaluate, or select potential adaptation strategies to cope with such impacts. These results indicate that although knowledge and outputs produced by these projects were used by stakeholders to inform adaptation planning, they were not used to make specific climate adaptation decisions (although they may have been used in the implementation of other resource management decisions).

Twenty-four respondents indicated that there were specific factors that they felt contributed to their use of project outputs and provided descriptions of these factors in openended replies. The most common factor was a strong partnership between the investigator

and stakeholder, illustrated as "trust, relationships, open-mindedness on all sides" and "an attention to the relationship, protocol, transparency, and communication". Some respondents described contexts with a very clear management challenge linked to a demonstrated information need, such as a "well defined management need to be explored" and "Federal mandated water settlement legislation". Respondents also mentioned several different ways in which investigators were able to make broad results relevant to their specific management challenge. Examples include the creation of "fine spatial resolution climate products" and the provision of "alternatives to traditional drought indices".

**Figure 3.** Word cloud generated from 40 open-ended responses to the question "What kinds of information, data, tools, or other products did this project provide you?".

Thirteen respondents indicated that specific factors limited their use of project results. The most common barriers were a need for additional time to use results (19.2 percent) and resource constraints (15.4 percent). One respondent described how late engagement in a project could act as a barrier to information use: "The one area that could have been improved would have been upfront discussion of delivery mechanisms to achieve broader impacts. The proposal included a component of incorporating results into specific agency products, without talking to the agency manager for all of those products before the proposal was submitted". Respondents also described a need for "continued data collection and processing," especially in places where extreme weather events disrupted data continuity. No respondents indicated an issue with the quality of the science provided by investigators.

These results indicate that while funded projects resulted in conceptual use of outputs (informing) by stakeholders and may have resulted in instrumental use (implementation) for general resource management [13], they fell short of their intended goal of instrumental use for climate adaptation. Stakeholders had confidence in the quality and integrity of scientific outputs and understood their broad relationship to management contexts but lacked time and resources to apply such information to specific climate adaptation decisions, plans, or actions. However, it has been noted that moving from conceptual to instrumental use of information can partly be a factor of the maturity of the project and the relationship between the investigator and stakeholder [43], and thus it is possible that revisiting respondents after additional time has passed may reveal stronger instrumental use of information. To capture long-term use of outputs by stakeholders, funding programs and climate service providers may need to implement evaluation processes that continue on for multiple years after the formal conclusion of a single activity.

### *4.3. Impacts: Building of Relationships and Trust*

Questions in this section of the survey were designed to examine the impacts of participating in a project to the building of relationships and trust between stakeholders and investigators. Research indicates that trust between investigators and stakeholders is foundational to two-way communication and accountability during the project and to sustain further work after the project [26]. Respondents reported positive feelings overall about their engagement in South Central and North Central CASC projects. Respondents felt satisfied with their experiences with the investigator team (93.6 percent) and felt satisfied with their experiences with the project (87.2 percent).

All respondents agreed that investigators were honest, sincere, and trustworthy, and 91.5 percent of respondents agreed that investigators were committed to the engagement process. The same percentage of respondents (91.5 percent) agreed that investigators appreciated and respected what they brought to the project, while 89.4 percent of respondents agreed that the investigators took their opinion seriously during the discussions. Furthermore, all respondents said it was likely that they would use additional results generated by this investigator team. These results indicate that stakeholders still felt goodwill towards investigators as individuals, even when engagement processes and integration of their input into the project might have fallen short of expectations.

Respondents provided a range of reasons that would make it likely for them to work with the investigators again in the future (Figure 4). Many respondents mentioned the nature of their relationship as a team, citing a desire to work with "good people" where the "collaborative spirit and tone of mutual respect is great". In addition to a positive team atmosphere, respondents mentioned the level of expertise of investigators. One project investigator was identified as an "outstanding scientist and human being," with the respondent adding that "[their] humility despite [their] great knowledge and intellect is inspiring". Finally, respondents mentioned the importance of the relevance of findings, such as the "ability to provide useful products" and "good, practical, implementable results that were directly applicable to my agency's goals and strategies".

**Figure 4.** Word cloud generated from 37 open-ended responses to the question "From your perspective, what reason(s) would make it likely for you to work with this investigator team or the CASC again in the future?".

When provided the opportunity to give any other feedback on their experience, several respondents noted their appreciation for the integration into the project of informal knowledge or results. One respondent highlighted the investigators' "willingness to more readily recognize and respond to non-peer reviewed (nascent) local research," and another acknowledged that investigators were willing to implement "a demonstration project" for local stakeholders. A third respondent stated that they valued support for a project "that was not firmly deliverables based" because one of the main outputs was the creation of a collaborative network of individuals.

Results from this section demonstrate the perceived value to stakeholders of building trusted partnerships and communities of practice. In particular, funding programs and climate service providers would benefit from identifying empirical methods for measuring and monitoring trust between the producers and users of climate services, as trust plays a key role in the uptake of information for policy and decision making [30,31]. Beyond trust, formative evaluation during a project could help investigators identify instances where stakeholders may feel that their input is not being appreciated or their opinions are not being taken seriously. This would allow for the institution of corrective actions to improve the flow of communications and provide more responsive climate services.

### **5. Discussion and Recommendations**

In this paper, we summarized a variety of approaches from the discipline of evaluation and described their relevance to defining success and evaluating the societal impacts of climate services within the context of climate impacts and adaptation research. We presented a case study to demonstrate how to operationalize selected approaches from this literature using a survey of stakeholders engaged in projects funded by the South Central and North Central CASCs. Funders of climate services, such as the CASCs, are positioned to influence the form and goals of research across many stages of the process, from setting the priorities that appear in a solicitation to identifying appropriate proposal review criteria to selecting which projects receive funding. Evaluation of and by funders of climate services is critical to understanding whether actions taken across each of these stages and by individual projects support the overall goal of societal impact [44,45].

Because virtually all respondents indicated satisfaction with projects and investigators, our ability to contrast projects and interpret differences among them was limited. Additionally, our case study was limited by the low survey response rate and relatively small sample size, possibly resulting from the immediate and lingering impact of the 2018–2019 U.S. federal government shutdown. As a result, although we were not able to use the collected data the way in which we originally intended, we still were able to examine the characteristics of investigators and projects that stakeholders found satisfactory. Describing these characteristics allowed us to meet our intended program objectives and provided lessons learned from completed projects that can be applied to subsequent similar projects.

Our results corroborated previous studies that have demonstrated that stakeholders prefer being engaged in projects early, often, and consistently [43,46]. Previous research has shown that stakeholders may become fatigued or stressed with interactions that do not result in perceptible changes to the research agenda to prioritize stakeholder benefits [47,48]. Our findings showed that even interacting with investigators more than once a week was perceived as satisfactory and not as too much interaction, opening the possibility that stakeholder fatigue may not be an issue when there is an obvious connection between the reason for the interaction and a benefit to the stakeholder. Almost all stakeholders left these interactions feeling better informed by the knowledge and outputs produced by projects and able to apply such knowledge and outputs to general resource management. However, very few of them were able to directly implement this information into climate adaptation planning or action, with several mentioning a need for additional time to use the results. Even so, stakeholders placed value on participation in these projects due to the relational benefits that they gained, such as growing their professional network and conversing with scientific experts in informal settings. Stakeholders also emphasized investigators' personal collaborative natures such as their ability to demonstrate mutual respect and humility, illustrating the importance of an investigator's willingness to take an "apprentice" role and learn from the decision makers [49].

Importantly, attempting to generate a summative "one size fits all" survey for such a broad set of objectives prevented us from examining the societal impact of individual projects, even if it helped identify characteristics of projects found satisfactory by stakeholders. Although we took care to design a single evaluation process that built on appropriate theory, methods, and survey design, we discovered that each project came with its own

unique objective regarding societal impact, which ideally needed an individually tailored evaluand and measures. Surveys such as ours are an increasingly common way for programs to evaluate the societal impact of their activities, but the results can fall short of achieving that goal. Instead, we recommend that future initiatives to examine societal impact for the CASCs, and other climate services funding programs, consider that evaluation for each project be integrated up front into proposal development, such as asking investigators to create a logic model with measurable attributes. Such an approach would help ensure that subsequent project evaluations would then be designed with a specific purpose in mind and could ameliorate the issue of a low response rate.

This additional request for inclusion of evaluation design and implementation, however, can only be met with a matching provision of additional resources from funders. Doing so would allow climate service providers to work with relevant evaluation experts to conduct an initial appraisal and design and implement an evaluation process. Smart [50] suggests seven key questions to consider when planning for evaluation, which we map to concepts useful for answering these questions in Table 3. These questions range from the big picture (why is it needed?) to the practical (who will I collect data from?). When combined, answers to the questions aid in the selection of evaluation approaches that provide meaningful information and guide improvement. Investigators, funders, and evaluators can use these questions as a common starting point when discussing evaluation.

**Table 3.** Seven key questions to consider when planning an evaluation process, and relevant concepts useful to answering these questions.


One unintended benefit of this study was that it fed into the broader conversation across the regional CASCs about whether it was possible to quantitatively measure the societal impacts of research projects that they fund. Since development and dissemination of this survey protocol, the Southeast CASC has carried out additional quantitative and qualitative research from which findings are still emerging. To date, their evaluation initiative has described the differing ways in which individuals and organizations use climate adaptation science [51] and the distinct pathways which projects that aim for societal impact can follow in comparison to projects that aim for high scientific impact [52]. These network-wide conversations are a continued effort to apply concepts from evaluation theory and practice to the challenge of funding and providing climate services.

### **6. Conclusions**

Evaluation is a critical component of understanding the societal impact of the provision of climate services, yet many existing approaches fall short of achieving this goal. We set out to do program-wide evaluation at the project-level by creating a single survey instrument. While analyzing our data, we noted that the diverse array of project objectives meant

that the single overarching survey did not contain enough nuance to evaluate individual projects. Instead, each project needed a tailored measurement tool that was developed with its unique objectives in mind. For example, we found that our survey could not capture the differing definitions of success between place-based projects for targeted stakeholders and projects producing large, regional-scale products for many stakeholders. Nor could our survey capture the differences between projects designed to build relationships and trust between people and those designed to provide context for making a specific decision. This study demonstrates the limitations of a program summatively evaluating projects and that embedding evaluation in each project from the start would be beneficial. In particular, funders of science can encourage applicants to proactively consider evaluation during proposal development and provide the resources to bring in relevant and necessary evaluation expertise to an investigator team.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, A.B.-D. and R.A.M.; Investigation, A.B.-D.; Supervision, R.A.M.; Writing—original draft, A.B.-D.; Writing—review & editing, A.B.-D. and R.A.M. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This work was funded by the U.S. Geological Survey South Central and North Central Climate Adaptation Science Centers. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** The study was conducted in accordance with U.S. Geological Survey Fundamental Science Practices, the Declaration of Helsinki, and approved by the Institutional Review Board of The University of Oklahoma (IRB number 7457). Paperwork Reduction Act approval was obtained from the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (control number 1090-0011).

**Informed Consent Statement:** Informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study.

**Data Availability Statement:** Bamzai-Dodson, A.; Lackett, J.; McPherson, R.A. North Central and South Central Climate Adaptation Science Center Project Evaluation: Survey Data Public Summary; U.S. Geological Survey data release: Reston, VA, USA 2022. https://doi.org/10.5066/P93WPOS5.

**Acknowledgments:** We thank the members of A.B.-D.'s dissertation committee, the Climate Adaptation Science Center Evaluation Working Group, and the Science of Actionable Knowledge Working Group for insightful discussions around what constitutes successful actionable science for climate adaptation. Special thanks are given to Kate Malpeli and Louise Johansson for their design work on Figure 1.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

### **References**


## *Article* **Climate Services and Transformational Adaptation**

**Edward R. Carr 1,2**


**Abstract:** The Working Group II contribution to the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report states that effective adaptation to the changing climate will require transformational changes in how people live. This article explores the potential for climate services to catalyze and foster transformational adaptation. I argue that weather and climate information are not, in and of themselves, tools for transformation. When designed and delivered without careful identification of the intended users of the service and the needs that service addresses, they can fail to catalyze change amongst the users of that information. At worst, they can reinforce the status quo and drive maladaptive outcomes. For climate services to serve as agents of transformational adaptation, the climate services community will have to change how it understands the users of these services and their needs. Building climate services around contemporary understandings of how people make decisions about their lives and livelihoods offers designers and implementers of climate services opportunities to create services that catalyze transformational adaptation. These opportunities provide examples for the wider field of adaptation to consider in its efforts to contribute to climate resilient development.

**Keywords:** adaptation; transformation; climate services; maladaptation; climate resilient development; risk; vulnerability; resilience

### **1. Introduction**

The IPCC's Working Group II contribution to the Sixth Assessment Report offers a stark message: we have delayed action for too long for incremental changes in our systems and the ways we live in the world to deliver a just, sustainable future [1]. Pathways to a climate-resilient future require the transformation of how we live in the world.

This assessment changes the calculus of adaptation programs, projects, and interventions. Actions aimed at preserving the status quo or introducing incremental changes intended to weather coming changes in climate will, in the end, not meet the moment. Instead, these efforts must facilitate transformative changes that move people toward climate-resilient improvements in human well-being, or climate-resilient development (CRD) [1]. At the same time, a growing literature points to the very limited evidence for the efficacy of our prior adaptation efforts [2,3] and growing evidence of their maladaptive outcomes [4–8]. In short, we have not been very good at climate change adaptation when framed around preservation. To pivot adaptation toward sparking transformative changes in how people live introduces even greater uncertainties to this project.

Climate services are an interesting adaptation intervention from which to consider how to facilitate or catalyze transformative changes toward climate-resilient development. They are information that, in and of itself, is not prescriptive (though there are cases where climate services are bundled with more prescriptive interventions such as seed and fertilizer programs). Thus, the intended users of this information can choose how they use it—in part or in whole, for the purposes envisioned by the producers of the service or for completely different goals. This lack of prescriptive power is evident in a growing body of work around the outcomes and impacts of climate services programs. In the ways in which it reveals

**Citation:** Carr, E.R. Climate Services and Transformational Adaptation. *Sustainability* **2023**, *15*, 289. https:// doi.org/10.3390/su15010289

Academic Editors: Charles Herrick, Jason Vogel and Glen Anderson

Received: 7 September 2022 Revised: 9 December 2022 Accepted: 12 December 2022 Published: 24 December 2022

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the author. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

how weather and climate information are taken up and used by their intended users, this work [9–16] sheds light on what in development studies [17] is a well-trodden critique: development and adaptation experts do not fully understand the current needs of their intended users, let alone the ways in which this information might facilitate transformative changes toward CRD.

There is much we still do not know about the users of climate services and their needs [18]. However, research on the dynamics of livelihoods in the context of development and adaptation interventions, economic change, and a changing environment points us toward what to look for as we consider the use of climate services as tools for transformative change toward CRD. Specifically, when we interrogate the resilience of socio-ecologies such as those that characterize agrarian communities in West Africa, we can see opportunities to catalyze (but not direct) transformative changes. At the broadest level, these opportunities exist in terms of the ability to reduce risk and vulnerability for agrarian populations. Doing so appears to create space for innovations in livelihoods practices and transformational shifts in the identities associated with those practices [19]. At the same time, delivering information in a manner that exacerbates risk and vulnerability, including the risk of changing the existing social order in a community, can result in decisions and actions that reinforce socio-ecologies against change. Over time, this renders them more vulnerable to catastrophic failures and costly transformations [20].

For climate services to serve as agents of transformative adaptation, the climate services community will have to change the ways it understands the users of these services and their needs. After briefly describing the historical practice of climate service design, I discuss recent progress in efforts to identify climate services users and needs. I identify persistent knowledge gaps that will continue to challenge our ability to use climate services as tools for transformative adaptation. I then offer some examples of climate services that are creating space for transformative change, consider the ways in which climate services might catalyze more rapid changes toward CRD, and suggest lessons for other interventions seeking to promote transformational adaptation and CRD.

### **2. Designing Climate Services**

The design of most climate services reflects an understanding of vulnerability as produced by exposure to the impacts of a variable and/or changing climate [15]. As a result, most early climate services were shaped by the availability of climate information and the ability to disseminate it [21,22]. Under this model, those with weather and climate information packaged and disseminated that information, allowing the recipients to do whatever they wanted with it. The design and dissemination of climate services often lacked careful consideration of who the intended users of the information were or what their needs might be.

While this was the dominant mode of climate service design until very recently, there were important exceptions, such as the initial design of Mali's Agrometeorological Advisory Program. The design of that program was shaped by Malians intimately familiar with agricultural production in the country, and who therefore understood who the users of this service were and what information they needed [23]. However, even this case of good initial design illustrates the challenges that the climate services community faced in identifying users and needs. As the drought that provided its initial impetus faded, the program was given new purposes and goals for which it had not been designed. Where once it had been well-targeted to specific users and needs, the expansion of program goals over the next two decades led to a situation where, by 2010, the program was making broad assumptions about its users and needs that were not borne out by examination [13,24,25].

More recently, a nuanced literature focused on the diversity of climate service end users and needs has emerged. Such work has lurked at the margins of the climate services community for two decades. In the early 2000s, Archer [26] and Roncoli [11,27] examined different users of climate services, whether farmers or in the forecast community. While this early work in this arena was slow to get traction, more recent development donor attention to climate services has shifted the emphasis in their design. These organizations have increasingly looked to climate services as means to address important environmental and social challenges. Refocusing climate services on the achievement of goals requires attention to those who uses the information, how they use it, and whether or not it helps them achieve their goals. Thus, the work of Roncoli and her co-authors [27] on the integration of scientific and indigenous understandings of precipitation forecasting set the stage for more recent work how to overcome persistent misperceptions about end-users in the climate services community [28–30]. Work pointing to the differences among end-users and their ability to interact with forecasts [26,31] was foundational for more recent efforts seeking to identify the specific information needs of different end-users [32–36] and facilitated the emergence of gendered and feminist approaches to understanding end-user needs [15,37]. Today, engagement with the users of climate services is integral to conversations about their impact [38,39]. At the same time, it is not controversial to suggest that climate services, as a field, struggles with the effective identification of end users and their needs [40] and that substantial, systematic research on this subject is needed to move the field forward [18].

While users and their needs have become central to the design and implementation of many climate services over the past decade, one aspect of the framing of climate services has remained constant. Whether carefully considering users and needs or not, they are framed as defensive tools for the preservation of existing ways of living the face of a changing climate, environment, and economy. Increased attention to users and needs allows us to think in more critical and nuanced ways about *whose* ways of living are preserved and protected by a particular service. However, at a time when the climate change community recognizes that transformational adaptation will be required to achieve CRD, interventions that preserve that which exists now risk becoming maladaptive. They can perpetuate practices that will become inviable over time or maintain social relations that act as barriers to significant changes in human well-being. Shifting the framing of climate services from defensive tools protecting people and livelihoods from the impacts of climate change to vehicles for the achievement of CRD requires more than just shifting the focus of climate services from the science of climate to the social and behavioral science of the intended enduser. It requires social science approaches that can identify opportunities for transformation that climate services might support or leverage.

Relatively little work in climate services has considered how they might contribute to transformational adaptation, or more broadly to CRD. Notable exceptions to this lie in work led by Hansen [38,41]. The approach in this work focuses on identifying broad relationships between the use of weather and climate information and the achievement of development goals. While this enables discussions of pathways by which climate services might, for example, address SDG 2 "Zero Hunger" [38], it does not unpack the very localized opportunities that such information leverages or the barriers that it overcomes to result in such impacts. To change climate services from efforts to hold off the bad effects of climate variability and change to vehicles for the sorts of transformation inherent to achieving development goals requires a different approach. I suggest that one productive means of understanding how climate services work as vehicles for transformational adaptation and the achievement of CRD is to understand how they intersect and interact with livelihoods, people's ways of living in the world [42–44].

### **3. Using Livelihoods Analysis to Design Transformational Climate Services**

A starting point for transformational climate services lies in understanding not only what the intended end-users of a given climate service want, but why they want it. This requires engagement with the perceptions of individuals and the social structures that give perceptions meaning. This sort of inquiry identifies two kinds of barriers and opportunities for climate services. The first are barriers to the uptake and use of different kinds of climate information. The second are barriers to and opportunities for such interventions to catalyze transformative adaptation that aligns CRD. This is not to suggest that climate science is irrelevant to the development of transformational climate services, but that it should not be the starting point of the design and implementation of those services.

Using livelihoods to understand how climate services work is not entirely new. In an effort to strengthen drought-preparedness efforts, Roncoli and her co-authors [45] examined the livelihoods implications of a severe drought in Burkina Faso. Using the predominant framing of livelihoods at that time, one focused on material means of making a living [46–48], they examined how farmers perceptions shaped their evaluations of and predictions for agricultural seasons. Through this work, they convincingly demonstrated that the farmers in their study were not helpless victims of drought, but agents worthy of engagement when planning forecasts, famine warnings, and other forms of weather and climate service. However, this early work differs from the question at hand in two important ways.

First, what Roncoli and her co-authors were studying was coping, rather than adaptation. Their goal was to demonstrate that farmers held stores of knowledge and practice for managing shocks like drought, and that what farmers know and do should be part of conversations that had, to that point, often been limited to development, humanitarian, and meteorological organizations. They did not examine the adaptive or transformational potential of the farmers in their study because that was not their aim.

Second, their framing of livelihoods and the ways in which farmers shifted them in the context of a drought was descriptive and material in its focus. Because the aim of the research was to demonstrate the value of farmer knowledge and practice to forecasting and early warning, there was little need for discussion of the social context within which farmer perceptions could be translated into decisions and actions. This work did not engage with the ways in which making a living is inextricably intertwined with making meaning of the world and how to live in it [42–44,49,50]. However, as the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC's Sixth Assessment Report recognizes, meaning, power, and agency are critical aspects of transformation and the achievement of CRD [1].

More recent work in livelihoods studies builds on the idea that livelihoods are always both about making a living and making sense of the world. This work creates opportunities for examining issues of meaning and value central to livelihoods decisions and practices, and therefore critical to the identification of opportunities for transformative change and CRD. Livelihoods research has developed a range of theoretical approaches to the making of meaning first articulated by Bebbington [44]. These include approaches that draw on Ortner's model of "serious games" [49], Bourdieu's theory of practice [50], and Foucault's concept of governmentality [43,51]. In this article, I draw from studies that employed the latter, in the form of the Livelihoods as Intimate Government approach. These illustrate how contemporary livelihoods approaches focused on meaning *and* materiality allow for the identification of barriers to the transformational use of climate services and opportunities for weather and climate information to catalyze such transformation.

### *3.1. Understanding the Transformative Potential of Climate Services through Livelihoods: LIG*

The Humanitarian Response and Development Lab (HURDL) at Clark University has employed the Livelihoods as Intimate Government approach to both evaluate the impact of climate services in sub-Saharan Africa and to inform the design of new services. Through this work, HURDL has identified nuanced reasons for the limited uptake of weather and climate services tied to social structures, power relations, and meaning [13,15,25]. At the same time, it has also identified spaces where transformational change might take root and flourish if properly supported by targeted weather and climate information [19,20].

As an approach, LIG focuses on the different understandings and experiences of the vulnerability context expressed by individuals in the same community or household. These differences speak to the understanding of different stressors, activities, and identities, providing a point of entry into the construction of meaning through livelihoods in a given place. Broadly speaking, LIG treats meaning as emerging at the intersection of three things: (1) discourses of livelihoods, which reflect local understandings of the "correct" activities to undertake and the correct way to undertake them given the challenges of the context, (2) the

ways in which those discourses and understandings mobilize identity as they speak to who should conduct what activities and how they should be conducted, and (3) tools of coercion, locally-appropriate means of disciplining people to ensure they align with expectations of their identity and the discourses of livelihoods [43,51]. Methodologically, LIG employs rapid ethnographic methods, including participant observation and semi-structured interviewing. Typically, fieldwork is conducted by teams of two or more researchers, spending eight to ten weeks in a community [51].

### *3.2. Climate Services as Barriers to Transformation*

A LIG analysis of the uptake and use of climate information provided by Mali's Agrometeorological Advisory Program speaks to how a well-targeted climate service might address short-term livelihoods and food security needs but over the long term hold back the sorts of transformation needed for successful adaptation. An initial assessment of the impact of the program commissioned by USAID [24] more than three decades after its launch found that the uptake of the advisories was very low and skewed toward men. Further investigation employed the LIG approach to explain this pattern of use [25]. The assessment found that the project was, on one hand, extremely well-designed for its stated purpose: addressing food availability challenges in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The advisories targeted key staple crops over which men had decision-making authority. Further, the nature of the advisories (such as providing farmers with constantly-updated information on when to plant, and what varieties to plant) meant that only the wealthiest fraction of men, those who owned both farm equipment and animal traction, could use the advisories. These, of course, were the men who would produce the most staple crop, and therefore be the audience that this program most needed to reach [13]. The assessment found that even in 2014, these men were still following the advisories [24,25].

However, the assessment also found that these advisories reinforced existing livelihoods—both their meaning and their material practices [25]. For example, by providing information that only the wealthiest, most senior men could use, the advisories reinforced the authority of these men over their households and extended families. As part of their role, these senior men are expected to make agricultural decisions for the fields of their families, most commonly the shared fields of the family. Such decisions also have implications for the fields of individual households in the concession because junior men do not want to contradict senior men. This can result in the loss of access to land and other agricultural resources. A senior man's power is not absolute. If he fails to successfully feed his family through his agricultural decisions and staple crop production, he can have his authority and status questioned or even stripped. Interestingly, the skill of these advisories, and thus their ability to productively inform on-farm decisions, has been questioned [52]. However, their accuracy might be beside the point. By providing something men could blame for faulty decisions, the advisories gave senior men a means of deflecting criticism of their decisions and therefore reduced their accountability to their households,. Reduced accountability for those with the greatest authority increases the durability of existing social structures, even under conditions of environmental stress. These structures limit women's authority and autonomy, and thus circumscribe one of the most well-understood pathways to transformative change and climate-resilient development: empowering women.

### *3.3. Climate Services as Catalysts of Transformational Adaptation*

Livelihoods analysis can help us identify situations where climate services reinforce the structural causes behind observed inequities in situations where transformational change is needed. It also can help identify opportunities for climate services to catalyze transformational change. I use the term catalyze advisedly here. As noted by Schipper and her co-authors [1], CRD pathways are not prescriptive steps that one takes toward a climate resilient future. Instead, these pathways emerge from formal and informal decisions taken by individuals, households, communities, and countries. More than 80 years of formal development practice have demonstrated that prescriptive transformations tend to reflect the desires and beliefs of the "developed", who are the wealthy and powerful, and thus those with the most invested in existing economic, political, and social structures. In short, this echoes an observation about livelihoods enabled by LIG, but at much larger scales. Just as in a household livelihoods decision, a transformation of international or global structures whose means and goals are managed by the wealthiest and most powerful is unlikely to challenge the structures that grant the powerful their privileges [43]. Seen from the perspective of the powerful, transformations are likely to be transformation for others, but status quo for the wealthy and powerful. Further, many decades of development have shown us that the transformations desired by "the developed" are often not those that "the developing" would select for themselves [17], resulting in many development projects and interventions with low rates of uptake and limited impact.

If we shift our thinking from the management of transformation to the catalysis of transformation, we shift our understanding of agency and outcomes in this process. While those with resources and authority are still able to invest in certain catalysts of change, they are not able to determine the final outcome of that which they start. Catalyzing change means creating opportunities for actors to make new decisions, take up new activities, and redefine how they live in the world in terms that make sense to them. Often the outcome is not far from the goals of formal development practice. For example, where we have seen women's empowerment around the world, it has come less from donor-funded gender sensitization programs than from women who understand how to identify and leverage opportunities in their specific contexts. Numerous studies of reversals of environmental degradation have demonstrated that local knowledge of the environment often has much more to do with effective outcomes than outside technical knowledge.

If climate services are to be catalysts of transformational adaptation, they must clearly identify opportunities for weather and climate information to create the conditions within which people can act in new ways without reinforcing existing structures that act as barriers to transformational change. One example lies in a broad observation that has emerged across HURDL's work on livelihoods. A broad synthesis of livelihoods data [19] spanning more than a thousand interviews and a dozen livelihoods zones across West Africa suggests that as individuals, households, and communities experience greater security from uncertainty and locally-specific drivers of vulnerability, spaces open for transformational change. For example, in Mali and Senegal, the most food and income secure households are also the places where one is most likely to find women taking on activities or roles that do not align with expectations, such as farming a "man's crop." In the most stressed and challenged households, we see no deviation from expectations.

This difference in attitude toward innovation and potential transformation lies in the ways stressors that challenge sources of income and assets present two threats. The first is material, which in the most stressed households can manifest as existential threats. Under such circumstances, insisting that all members of the household play their roles is justified as a pathway to safety and security in a context of vulnerability. At the same time, these stressors also threaten the existing social order. In these households, men are often failing to feed their families adequately. They therefore risk loss of status and authority each season. Allowing other members of the household to take on new tasks, or to take on tasks and responsibilities that belong to men, risks demonstrating that these men and their decisions need not be at the center of livelihoods. Thus, men have an incentive to carefully enforce roles and responsibilities in their households to ward off challenges to their authority. In situations where material and social stresses converge, livelihoods can become rigid to the point of brittleness. This puts households and communities at risk of catastrophic transformations where existing livelihoods (both activities and the meanings and order behind them) are pushed past thresholds of sustainability [20]. On the other hand, in households where production, and therefore the status of the man in charge of the household, is secure, a woman farming a man's crop presents neither a material nor a social threat and is tolerated. Over time, such spaces of deviation and innovation can

quietly redefine what is seen as acceptable behavior for women, junior men, or others in society, creating a pathway toward CRD.

This suggests that one way that climate services can promote transformational adaptation and pathways toward CRD is by focusing on vulnerability reduction. This is not the same thing as risk reduction. Risk requires understanding the likelihood of a hazard's occurrence. Vulnerability, on the other hand, demands we understand how that hazard impacts a person's way of living in the world. By providing information that can lower the vulnerability associated with different livelihoods, climate services can create the sorts of security and safety that allow for the sorts of innovation and transgression that can result in transformation. Such outcomes might come through increased production during average years as climate services reduce the need for inefficient hedging. Perhaps forecasts can facilitate livelihoods planning to address the impacts of excessively wet, dry, or hot years. There are any number of possible contributions climate services might make to transformational adaptation and CRD. Like the observation about vulnerability reduction above, such contributions should be identified through nuanced understandings of the current structure of activities and society and be targeted toward explicit sites where change can be catalyzed. Following this line of thinking moves us past a framing of climate services as solutions for adaptation and development challenges in and of themselves. Instead, it presents climate services as locally appropriate facilitators of transformation to CRD.

### **4. Conclusions**

The remaining pathways toward increased CRD are transformational in character [3]. The climate change community of practice is pivoting toward CRD as a framing for climate action that moves us past the preservation of current systems, structures, and levels of well-being. For climate services to contribute to this changing understanding of climate action and its goals, we must rethink their purpose. Where once climate services were also implicitly defensive tools for the preservation of current practices and structures in the face of growing threats, today climate services should be viewed as potential catalysts of CRD. How we might do this for climate services illustrates broader principles for transformational adaptation that can be applied to all manner of adaptation interventions.

The pivot to transformational adaptation makes the ongoing attention to users and needs central not only to the long-term relevance of climate services, but also to any adaptation intervention with transformational aspirations. The climate change community requires an expansion of inquiry into the users of adaptation interventions and their needs to fill the substantial gaps in our knowledge. However, this work must not fall into the trap of an exclusive focus on understanding and preserving what currently exists in the face of change. Inquiry into the opportunities for transformation in existing systems and situations is the foundation for transformational adaptation.

A pivot toward users and needs emphasizes the potential value and importance of co-produced adaptation interventions. However, it also highlights that such co-production itself must be built on a deep understanding of users [39,53–55]. In its discussion of the structures behind observed livelihoods decisions and uses of weather and climate services, this article highlights the need for deep engagement with users of adaptation interventions that will not emerge in a single workshop, but through extended engagement and learning through the design, implementation, and monitoring of adaptation in action. The identification of transformational opportunities is fraught with micro-politics and competing interests, making everything from who participates in co-production to the means of eliciting ideas and understandings critical to the transformational potential of such activities. Co-production is not, by itself, a means of making adaptation interventions effective catalysts of CRD. The character of co-production is critical.

Finally, aligning climate services with CRD highlights the need to coordinate adaptation interventions with other efforts to create opportunities for transformational change that speak to development challenges. While an effective seasonal forecast might tell farmers what they need to plant to avoid negative outcomes, without access to seeds and

appropriate farming equipment that information will not be translated into the safety and security that creates spaces of transgression and transformation. Further, even in situations where an adaptation intervention does contribute to increased safety and security, those seeking to transgress will need access to opportunity. While the women in wealthy, secure households described above *can* farm men's crops and avoid sanction or even attention, they cannot do so without access to seed, land, and farming equipment. It is only through deep engagement with the users of adaptation interventions that we will learn what opportunities they are seeking, what opportunities we can create, and the limits of different adaptation interventions on our path to CRD.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Acknowledgments:** Any time one attempts to write a piece with a broad agenda, it stands on more shoulders than can be named in an acknowledgements section. This article benefited from more than a decade of conversations about adaptation and climate services with many colleagues, including John Furlow, Sheila Onzere, Helen Rosko, Kwame Owusu-Daaku, Daniel Abrahams, Tshibangu Kalala, Jim Hansen, Cathy Vaughan, Simon Mason, Glen Anderson, Steve Zebiak, Zack Guido, Jim Buizer, Janae Davis, and Rob Goble. My thinking on adaptation was also greatly influenced by my co-authors in Chapter 18 of the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC's Sixth Assessment report, including Lisa Schipper, Siri Eriksen, Aromar Revi, Ben Preston, Luis Fernández-Carril, Bruce Glavovic, Nathalie J.M. Hilmi, Debbie Ley, Rupa Mukerji, Silvia Muylaert de Araujo, Rosa Perez, Steve Rose and Pramod Singh.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The author declares no conflict of interest.

### **References**


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**Arsum Pathak 1,\*, Laura E. Hilberg 2, Lara J. Hansen 2,\* and Bruce A. Stein <sup>3</sup>**


**Abstract:** Nature-based solutions (NbS) involve the reliance on natural or nature-based systems to enhance community resilience through delivering both climate adaptation and mitigation outcomes. While NbS do not necessarily represent new "technology" or methods, the intentional incorporation of these approaches into climate adaptation and mitigation efforts is often considered novel, particularly within the climate services sector where interventions have historically prioritized structural infrastructure approaches. NbS can offer an effective replacement for or complement to such traditional infrastructure approaches. Additionally, natural and nature-based systems can respond to climate change in a manner that engineered solutions often cannot, providing long-term holistic adaptation and mitigation success with additional benefits to ecosystem services such as improved air and water quality, carbon sequestration, outdoor recreation, and biodiversity protection. The incorporation of NbS as a core component of climate services increases the likelihood of adoption and effective implementation, ensuring greater long-term effectiveness for both communities and the natural systems on which they depend. This article supports the adoption and effective implementation of NbS by climate service providers through presenting a set of seven "key considerations" for their use in community-based adaptation. These key considerations are based on a review of work in the field to date, both within the United States and globally. Although these key considerations were developed in support of US adaptation planning applications (specifically, the US Climate Resilience Toolkit), they have global relevance.

**Keywords:** climate services; nature-based solutions; vulnerability assessment; climate adaptation; resilience; co-production

### **1. Introduction**

As the pace and scale of climate change and its impacts become increasingly evident across the United States and globally, there is a growing need for robust and reliable climate services, which can be defined as the provision of climate information for use in decision making [1]. Climate data from across multiple sensors and observation platforms document increasing climate variability, including changes in temperature and precipitation patterns, more extreme weather events, and rising sea level. The number of billion-dollar weather and climate disasters in the United States has doubled from about five events per year in 1990–1999 to close to 13 events annually in 2010–2019, with losses exceeding 900 billion USD in these last 10 years [2]. These climatic changes and their associated impacts are affecting our water systems, biodiversity, food supply, and health with far-reaching consequences for US communities and ecosystems [3]. As these climate impacts become even more disruptive in the future, the approaches to mitigate these risks will require novel thinking that moves away from business-as-usual strategies such as traditional structural solutions (e.g., levees, sea walls, and stormwater drainage channels). In the face of accelerating climate change, the limitations of such hard infrastructure approaches—high costs, limited

**Citation:** Pathak, A.; Hilberg, L.E.; Hansen, L.J.; Stein, B.A. Key Considerations for the Use of Nature-Based Solutions in Climate Services and Adaptation. *Sustainability* **2022**, *14*, 16817. https://doi.org/10.3390/ su142416817

Academic Editors: Mohammad Valipour, Charles Herrick, Jason Vogel and Glen Anderson

Received: 30 September 2022 Accepted: 13 December 2022 Published: 15 December 2022

**Publisher's Note:** MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

**Copyright:** © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).

lifetime, risks of maladaptation—are becoming all too evident [4]. Such static structures, which are often designed to standards based on past climatic conditions, may not be able to keep up with the increasing climate variability and, accordingly, may have escalating maintenance costs. A lack of community or ecological co-benefits and, in many cases, negative or maladaptive consequences can make them an unsuitable adaptation solution in certain circumstances.

The role of nature, on the other hand, is receiving increasing attention for coping with growing climate risks, and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has published several reports designed to define and operationalize the concept of nature-based solutions (NbS) [5,6]. The concept of NbS builds on the framework of "ecosystem services", which, over the past few decades, has emerged as an important approach for understanding, documenting, and valuing the varied contributions of nature to people [7,8]. By providing protective benefits, NbS nest within the "regulation of environmental processes" category of ecosystem services as defined by the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services [8]. Nature-based solutions can offer effective approaches for addressing climate vulnerabilities and reducing risks through replacing or complementing traditional infrastructure approaches [5]. Additionally, natural and nature-based systems can respond to changing climatic conditions in a manner that engineered solutions often cannot, offering long-term holistic adaptation and mitigation outcomes [4,9,10].

Nature-based solutions are rapidly becoming a core component of what US climate service providers can offer to communities in support of their adaptation and resilience planning and implementation efforts. This review is, therefore, intended to help climate service providers understand the conceptual basis for NbS and explore a set of key considerations for the broader application of NbS in community-based adaptation and resilience planning. Specifically, the aim of this review article is to support increased or improved adoption and implementation of NbS in climate services to effectively reduce climate change impacts. This is accomplished through two main objectives. First, the article presents seven key considerations designed to guide climate service providers in the US through the process of incorporating NbS into community adaptation planning. Second, the article highlights factors required to be considered by climate service providers to help them embed these considerations across different levels and users of the climate service process. These key considerations stemmed from literature reviews, organizational expertise, and discussions with adaptation practitioners, and were developed in support of the US Climate Resilience Toolkit [11]. Although our focus here is on US applications and adaptation planning, these key NbS considerations have global relevance.

In general, climate services tend to focus on making climate information more available and accessible for decision makers at all levels, as well as filling data gaps as they arise and demand is identified. One of the greatest challenges for the uptake of NbS is their limited integration into existing climate services and use by climate service providers. Therefore, among the first steps in better integrating NbS will be to broaden the information scope of climate services and climate service providers to share NbS-relevant data and options in support of adaptation. Existing climate services frameworks already offer avenues through which the integration of NbS could be explored at each level of the climate service process. For instance, each component of the Global Framework for Climate Services proposed by Hewitt et al. [12]—users, user interface platform, climate services information system, observations and monitoring, and research, modeling, and prediction—can incorporate multiple nature-based considerations. Starting with ensuring that natural systems are included in observation and monitoring to designing research and models that can generate NbS-relevant projections is essential to creating a climate services information system that not only considers NbS (and natural systems more broadly) in its process but can also provide easily discoverable information (through a user interface platform) relevant to NbS so that users can apply the outputs to NbS implementation. Across all of this is the need to increase capacity of users and service providers at each level in order to expand skills and knowledge related to NbS.

As climate service providers support partners in developing adaptation strategies, there are many opportunities to incorporate NbS, including as part of hazard mitigation/risk reduction, restoration, and infrastructure development, and ensuring the sustainability of ecosystem services (e.g., water quality and quantity, and carbon sequestration) [9,10,13]. Indeed, NbS may often be able to address multiple climate stressors (temperature, flooding, drought, and sea level rise) in support of multiple local goals with less directed long-term management. For example, floodplain protection and/or management is an NbS that incorporates well into hazard mitigation planning to address flood impacts. Similarly, integration of vegetation buffers (e.g., forests and riparian habitat) around and through communities can serve to reduce flood risk, ameliorate thermal stress, and support ecosystem services (water quality, air quality, wildlife, and recreation), as well as aquifer recharge. Furthermore, NbS can level the playing field by offering more affordable, sustainable adaptation solutions, making them a particularly useful option for climate service providers to share with partner communities.

### **2. What Are Nature-Based Solutions**

"Nature-based solutions" (NbS) refer to the use of natural systems and processes to deliver a variety of environmental benefits, especially for climate adaptation/resilience and climate mitigation goals. These strategies can range from planting trees and installing rain gardens in urban areas to provide shade and reduce stormwater flow to restoring rivers and floodplains to reduce flood risks and improve water quality. NbS include a broad range of strategies, from conservation of intact natural systems and restoration of priority ecosystems to the use of engineered systems designed to mimic natural system functions [10]. They also include nonstructural solutions such as open-space preservation through buyouts and easements. Nature-based strategies can complement structural solutions to form hybrid or "green/gray" systems for climate adaptation and risk reduction.

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) defines NbS as " ... actions to protect, sustainably manage and restore natural and modified ecosystems in ways that address societal challenges effectively and adaptively, to provide both human well-being and biodiversity benefits" [5].

This broad conception of NbS encompasses or intersects with several related terms and approaches, as noted above. This includes terms that completely overlap with the NbS concept (e.g., natural defenses, natural infrastructure, and ecosystem-based adaptation), as well as terms that are a subset of NbS tailored to a specific concern (e.g., green infrastructure (for stormwater management) and natural climate solutions (for carbon sequestration)). Preferred terminology may depend on the specific sector, community, or location. For instance, the term natural infrastructure often resonates with planners and policymakers accustomed to working with traditional gray infrastructure; accordingly, this NbS-related term is often used in federal and state policies and funding authorizations. The framing of NbS can also influence public perception and policy choices, which can lead to both ambiguity and overly narrow conceptualizations, thereby sometimes enabling practices with negative consequences for biodiversity and people [14,15]. The seven key considerations presented below are based on a broad conception of NbS and designed to reduce such ambiguity and overly narrow characterizations in order to promote the effective incorporation of the concept in climate services and adaptation more generally.

### **3. Key Considerations for Incorporating Nature-Based Solutions**

In 2020, the IUCN published a collaboratively developed global standard for the design and application of NbS, offering a common framework for increasing the scale and impact of these approaches while seeking to avoid inconsistent and ungrounded applications of the concept [6]. Although the IUCN standard reflects a significant advance in mainstreaming NbS globally, the structure of that standard (eight criteria and 28 associated indicators) is highly conceptual and may not meet the practical needs of US climate service providers and their local community adaptation clients. Building on that standard, this paper proposes seven "key considerations" for the use of NbS (Figure 1) that can be embedded in existing climate services, products, and frameworks at the local and regional levels. Through incorporating these considerations, the field of climate services can expand the scope and relevance of its support for community-based adaptation clients and other users.

**Figure 1.** Key considerations for use of nature-based solutions.

### *3.1. Recognize Natural Systems and Processes as Critical Infrastructure*

Climate service providers working through an adaptation planning process with communities typically focus first on project scoping, which includes identifying key community assets and critical infrastructure (e.g., schools, hospitals, emergency services, power plants and other utilities, and levees and seawalls). Because damage to or loss of these structures and the services they provide would have significant impacts on the health and safety of the community, these structures and services are typically priorities for protection from climate-related hazards. Although they are often not included within inventories of critical community assets, natural systems such as forests, rivers, floodplains, tidal wetlands, and coral reefs also provide crucial benefits and services to human communities, including protection from natural hazards such as flooding, erosion, and extreme heat [4,10,16–19]. The essential ecosystem services provided by natural systems also include other social, economic, and cultural benefits such as freshwater supplies, improved air and water quality, provisioning of food and other resources, pollination services, and recreational opportunities, as well as the nonmaterial benefits (e.g., cultural, spiritual, and aesthetic value) provided by natural ecosystems [5,20].

Many community benefits and ecosystem services provided by natural systems cannot be easily replaced by engineered structures, which can be costly to build and maintain and provide fewer additional benefits compared to functioning natural systems. For instance, living shoreline projects use natural techniques to stabilize shorelines, providing wave attenuation that buffers storm surge while also supporting birds, marine life, and local recreational opportunities, often costing less than conventional shoreline armoring techniques [21–23]. Some benefits provided by natural systems may also be difficult or impossible to replace once the natural system is degraded or lost. For instance, large-scale loss of forest cover can also result in significant alterations in local or regional hydrology, with resulting implications for community water supplies and water quality [24]. In many

instances, the protective functions and other ecosystem services provided by these systems are likely to become even more critical as the climate changes, exacerbating coastal erosion, extreme heat events, water shortages, biodiversity loss, and other stressors impacting community safety and wellbeing [17].

For climate service providers, working with a community to identify critical natural systems/assets and features is essential for supporting climate adaptation, including the design and implementation of NbS. Practitioners can draw from a range of information sources to identify the natural systems and processes that comprise a community's natural assets, such as existing planning documents, local inventories, remote sensing, and community knowledge. Employing a range of methods results in a comprehensive understanding of natural assets that extends beyond designated parks and recreational infrastructure (e.g., piers and nature trails) to also include wetlands and waterways, riparian buffers and floodplains, urban tree canopies, and wildlife habitat corridors. During this process, it is important for climate service providers to help communities explore the full range of co-benefits and ecosystem services that natural assets can provide (e.g., climate regulation, storm surge protection, and job opportunities), as these may not have been previously discussed or identified as valuable by community members. For instance, a flood-prone community losing mangroves to development or expanding shrimp aquaculture may not be appropriately valuing the role of mangroves in flood and erosion control and as a nursery habitat that supports recreational fishing. The process of identifying natural systems and the critical services they provide to the community can also serve as an opportunity for community members to come together and build relationships that will support collaborative planning and implementation of specific NbS projects within the community. For climate service providers, the discussions that occur in these settings can illuminate community values and interests, paving the way for meaningful stakeholder engagement.

### *3.2. Consider Climate Impacts on Priority Natural Resources*

The ability of natural systems to respond to disturbances by withstanding or recovering from the disruption, as well as past exposure leading to existing adaptation to such stresses, is one aspect of why NbS are attractive to communities as part of their adaptation planning [10,25]. For example, transport and deposition of sediments from higher up in the watershed results in accretion of soils in downstream wetlands and estuaries. This may provide enough additional land to replace erosional loses after storms or match land loss due to sea level rise [25,26]. However, climate change is likely to challenge ecosystems, making even intact, disturbance-adapted systems vulnerable to rapidly changing conditions and climate extremes. Ecosystems that have been altered or degraded by human land uses or activity are generally even more vulnerable to climate impacts, as anthropogenic stressors reduce the natural adaptive capacity of those systems to respond to and cope with change [10]. For example, urban encroachment and upstream dams can limit the natural movement of sediment into tidal marshes, preventing natural accretion and reducing their resilience to storms and sea level rise [27]. As a result, the vulnerability of human communities to the impacts of climate stressors and extreme climate events cannot be considered in isolation from how natural systems are affected by climate change. In doing so, the protective benefits and ecosystem services provided to those communities by natural systems could be overestimated. Evaluating both natural systems and human community vulnerabilities together allows for identifying where existing and intact natural systems are more likely to continue to deliver protective benefits and services, as well as where this may not be the case, requiring either additional assistance to restore ecosystem functioning or non-NbS solutions. Therefore, it is essential that climate services are inclusive of data and resources that also explore the implications of climate change for these natural systems.

The process of understanding how natural ecosystems are likely to be affected by climate change is typically accomplished through assessing the vulnerability of these resources [28]. A vulnerability assessment can support community adaptation planning through the following approaches:


Numerous approaches exist to assess the climate-related vulnerabilities and risks to species and ecological systems [28]. Just as all adaptation is local, selecting the right vulnerability assessment process is also dependent on the locality (e.g., resources present, detail required, data availability, and resource availability). When considering the climate change vulnerability of natural systems, climate service providers should seek to use the most ecologically relevant climate variables (which often may involve extremes rather than averages) and multiple future scenarios. Relying on ecologically relevant facts can provide the most accurate picture of ecosystem responses, but can be complex and may not necessarily be supported by the most widely accessible climate datasets. Ultimately, understanding the components of the vulnerability of ecosystems their associated species is essential to creating and implementing adaptation strategies that will successfully benefit human communities.

### *3.3. Consider Equity Implications in the Design and Application of NbS*

Natural assets can be important to communities, offering valuable options for reducing climate risks and enhancing their overall wellbeing and resilience. However, NbS can also magnify existing inequities and/or create new challenges within a community. Historically, natural features such as parks, nature trails, and green spaces have benefitted predominantly white and more affluent communities [29]. Even when natural infrastructure is prioritized in low-income communities and communities of color, historical disinvestment and underinvestment in those same communities can make natural infrastructure projects less equitable. In Baltimore, Maryland, several smaller natural infrastructure projects installed by nongovernmental organizations and community groups have been predominantly located in areas with higher African-American populations that are less likely to have larger, city-funded projects. As compared to large-scale city-funded projects in neighboring communities, these non-city-led projects are limited to small rain gardens or micro-bioretention facilities [30].

Certain nature-based approaches such as creation of green spaces and floodplain acquisitions can also create new challenges and increase risks for socially vulnerable populations. Creating green spaces and other urban greening programs can increase housing costs and property values with several factors such as location (e.g., distance from downtown), scale, and function affecting whether a place gentrifies, risking displacement of the community members these strategies are intended to benefit [31]. Nonstructural solutions such as flood buyouts also commonly benefit whiter, wealthier, and more urban communities, although lower-value properties and properties owned by communities of color are more likely to accept and be bought out than higher-value properties through these programs [32].

Designing and implementing equitable NbS efforts are crucial to break the patterns of existing and historic inequities and build the adaptive capacity of socially vulnerable and marginalized communities. Natural and nature-based features, when prioritized in at-risk, socially vulnerable communities, can effectively address climate risks for these communities, as well as substantively contribute to an improvement in quality of life for community residents. Strategies such as inclusive and collaborative planning, partnership with tribal, indigenous, and other natural resource-dependent groups, and meaningful outreach and education can support representative NbS planning and implementation.

The effectiveness of climate products and services hinges on how well they center the needs of different users, particularly underrepresented and marginalized groups. This will require climate service providers to engage diverse stakeholders (e.g., community-based organizations) and co-produce products (e.g., risk assessments and adaptation action plans) that address user needs. Adaptation options driven by equitable and inclusive climate services will not only expand the usability of climate services by decision makers and public agencies, but also lead to more just outcomes in climate-resilient communities.

### *3.4. Ensure That NbS Yield Net Positive Biodiversity Benefits*

Nature-based solutions should enhance biodiversity value and yield net biodiversity benefits, for instance, through incorporating site-specific designs and materials. Biodiversity includes multiple levels of biological organization—from genes and species to ecosystems and each level of organization can be understood as consisting of three major components: composition, structure, and function [33]. NbS, depending on the type of project, may rely on one or more of these levels or components, for instance, a particular species (i.e., composition), habitat (i.e., structure), or biological processes (i.e., function). Strategies such as tree plantings using native and climate-resilient species, beaver reintroductions to restore wetlands and riparian areas, and living shorelines that use oysters and marsh grasses to stabilize coasts both offer protective benefits and strengthen long-term ecosystem resilience.

Natural ecosystems and native species are already under stress from a variety of anthropogenic sources, which, in many instances, has significantly reduced their natural adaptive capacity. Climate change is adding another layer of threats to already sensitive species or degraded systems, sometimes directly (e.g., higher temperatures and increasing drought) and, at other times, by exacerbating existing stresses. Addressing the species and ecosystem impacts of climate change, through targeted adaptation actions and climatesmart conservation practices [34], is essential to sustaining NbS functions. In doing so, it is important to seek net positive biodiversity and ecological outcomes, which not only slow ecological deterioration but also achieve actual ecological enhancement in value and function. Understanding climate change impacts on biodiversity, both spatially and temporally, will influence these decisions. In certain cases, priority habitats (e.g., sites containing the sole remaining populations of endangered species) will require an immediate emphasis. Similarly, areas where the effects of climate change are likely to be buffered and, therefore, hospitable for the lasting survival of particular species, also known as climate change refugia, may be useful to protect and prioritize.

Climate services offer an opportunity to embed biodiversity conservation outcomes in NbS design and implementation efforts. The recently released IPBES Values Assessment [35] highlights the current dominant, yet narrow, focus on short-term profits and economic growth when valuing nature in decision making as a key driver of the global biodiversity crisis. Climate service providers can help broaden this focus by bringing a holistic understanding of ecological values and services in the design and implementation of NbS. This can be achieved by embedding a combination of biodiversity data, local ecological knowledge, and multiple stakeholders throughout the generation and provision of climate service products. Additionally, continuous monitoring and evaluation of NbS to account for ecosystem uncertainties and climate impacts can mitigate unintended consequences, as well as inform future efforts to enhance the functionality and connectivity of ecosystems to achieve net biodiversity enhancement [36,37].

### *3.5. Seek to Protect or Restore Critical Natural Infrastructure*

Intact natural systems are themselves at risk of climate change. Along the Gulf of Mexico, coastal ecosystems such as beaches and dune systems, offering protective benefits to nearby communities, are susceptible to erosion and conversion to open water due to sea level rise and saltwater intrusion [38]. Similarly, rangelands in Arizona, which offer habitat for an array of wildlife species, are experiencing mass mortality events due to more frequent and severe periods of droughts and climate change-fueled wildfires [39].

Protecting and restoring critical natural infrastructure will be essential adaptation strategies to help ensure that such systems will continue to provide ecosystem services and community benefits. This can involve prioritizing the protection of intact natural systems, restoration of degraded systems, incorporating nature-based features in engineered systems, and/or integration of natural (green) and engineered (gray) approaches in hybrid infrastructure. Protecting existing biodiversity and still extant natural systems should be a priority, but restoring the composition, function, or structure of already degraded ecological systems is becoming increasingly important for achieving adaptation and mitigation outcomes through NbS. In an era of rapid climate change, ecological restoration should not be viewed solely as a return to prior or historical states, but rather in the context of sustaining ecological function under current and future conditions. The International Standards for the Practice of Ecological Restoration [40] provides such a framework for guiding the development and implementation of ecological restoration projects. Ultimately, protection and restoration efforts will need to be taken in the light of broader climatic changes where the focus lies not just on preservation and restoration to historical conditions (i.e., managing for persistence), but one that is simultaneously open to anticipating and actively facilitating ecological transitions (i.e., managing for change) [34].

Climate services will need to integrate and embed ecological knowledge, as well as natural resource expertise to provide the required context for nature-based adaptation decisions. This includes efforts such as risk mapping and impact modeling for vulnerable ecosystems based on long-term climate and ecological datasets. Such integrated data serves as a useful climate service product for ecological and natural resource scientists and managers, planners, and representatives from federal, state and local agencies (e.g., fish, wildlife, and parks departments), conservation organizations, tribal and indigenous groups, equity-centered organizations, and others to share technical expertise, datasets, and knowledge of the region's natural resources.

### *3.6. Give Natural Features and Processes Space to Function*

By nature, most intact ecosystems are dynamic and possess at least some ability to respond to change over time [25]. For example, coastal dune systems that are unrestricted by the presence of roads or development are constantly shifting as wind and waves move the sand, allowing them to naturally migrate inland as sea levels rise [41,42]. Rivers, wetlands, forests, and grassland systems all also have the ability to respond to environmental changes, through varied mechanisms such as sediment accretion (or erosion) and shifts in vegetation communities, among others [43–45]. In general, the systems that offer the most significant protective benefits to human communities are often those that have evolved to cope with a wide range of conditions and/or rapid fluctuations in environmental conditions, and so are well adapted to absorb the impacts of extreme weather and other climate-related hazards without significant degradation to the system or surrounding areas. However, in many places, human land uses have altered or constrained natural systems, preventing them from absorbing and responding to change and increasing exposure of surrounding communities to climate-related hazards such as flooding. For example, floodplains are well equipped to capture and hold excess stormwater, allowing it to be absorbed slowly and preventing downstream flooding [46]. Unfortunately, floodplains are often highly valued for development, and, where this occurs, the flood protection and erosion control benefits of this system are lost for surrounding natural and human communities, as well as those that lie downstream [47,48]. Furthermore, as climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme precipitation events, inappropriate siting of new infrastructure and development is likely to cause even greater risks or create new hazards in areas that were not previously vulnerable to flooding.

Well-functioning natural systems also include complex processes that operate across a variety of spatial and temporal scales, such that what happens in one area may be inextricably tied to the functions of adjacent systems or more distant locations. For example, streamflow volume and water quality in a given stream reach is heavily dependent on the surrounding land uses, both upstream and in neighboring upland and riparian areas that absorb and filter runoff [49,50]. As a result, successful implementation of NbS designed

to address flood risk or water quality issues would need to consider both the impacts of climate change and the hoped-for benefits of NbS at the watershed scale and not just the community scale.

Climate service providers supporting communities in expanding the use of NbS for hazard reduction and other co-benefits must think in terms of larger ecosystem scales and processes in order to ensure that natural systems have the space that they need to function. This becomes even more important as the climate changes and natural systems are responding to more extreme conditions, which may necessitate protection, restoration, or creation of systems or consideration of natural processes that extend across larger areas. In contrast to non-NbS approaches that require human intervention for modifications or adjustments (as well as constant maintenance), NbS designed at appropriate spatial and temporal scales have the potential to respond to changing conditions while still delivering desired ecosystem services.

### *3.7. Integrate NbS into Existing Planning Processes*

The easiest way to include NbS is to simply adopt these measures as part of existing planning processes. This includes integrating climate-smart solutions into legally required land-use planning efforts, such as comprehensive or general plans, multi-hazard mitigation plans, community/neighborhood plans, and utility plans, as well as climate action plans that may or may not be required in any given jurisdiction. NbS as presented in the examples in this paper, can be offered by climate service providers as components of these plans that reduce climate risk, with the added potential benefits of reduced long-term maintenance cost, less direct management, possible autonomous improvement, and the support of associated ecosystems and their services.

To those ends, there is opportunity, heretofore underutilized, to include NbS as key climate change adaptation elements in traditional local planning processes. For example, aspects of each of the many elements of a local comprehensive or general plan (e.g., housing, transportation, public facilities, and environment) are vulnerable to climate change [51], and there is opportunity to incorporate NbS into planning for each of these sectors to reduce those vulnerabilities.

While NbS can be incorporated into almost any local planning process, there are also opportunities to build local capacity and uptake of NbS through the participants in those processes. This may require engaging multi-solution climate service provides, rather than just hard infrastructure-focused engineering firms, in order to focus on developing more holistic solutions that include NbS. At the same time, local community desires to include NbS could increase climate service provider awareness, and NbS-interested stakeholders included in local planning processes could increase community ability to implement NbS. For example, including natural resource managers and environmental justice stakeholders with natural system interests will help to identify opportunities for NbS that can support the needs of both nature and local communities.

As previously mentioned, climate services may also need to include additional information to support fully integrating NbS into local planning. For example, the data needed to understand the scope of local impacts and vulnerabilities may require different components (e.g., stream flow and timing, soil temperature, and species composition) at different scales (e.g., watershed and seasonal/decadal) with different thresholds (e.g., extremes and timing/phenology).

### **4. Conclusions**

Given the vital role of climate services in delivering support to local entities in their efforts to develop effective community-based adaptation plans, ensuring that NbS are fully integrated into climate service offerings will be essential for achieving successful adaptation and mitigation outcomes. The seven "key considerations" outlined above are designed to guide the inclusion of NbS into local planning processes, resulting in improved adoption of climate adaptation actions that are sustainable for both communities and the ecosystems around them. In addition, designing and implementing NbS on the basis of these key considerations can offer adaptation solutions that may be less expensive and less fragile than comparable gray infrastructure options.

Climate services are meant to provide useful and usable climate information in a timely and tailored manner to support adaptation. To date, climate services have been envisioned to focus on delivery of climate data (e.g., temperature, precipitation, and sea level rise), socioeconomic data, vulnerability assessments, and guidance to assist users (individuals and decision makers). However, existing climate service frameworks can be improved and informed by inclusion of nature-based adaptation solutions in general and incorporation of these NbS-specific key considerations. With growing interest in and need for the use of natural and nature-based approaches for climate risk reduction, it is necessary to more explicitly embed NbS within the framework of any climate service to ensure the intended benefits of these services to all users.

**Author Contributions:** Conceptualization, A.P., L.E.H., L.J.H. and B.A.S.; writing, A.P., L.E.H., L.J.H. and B.A.S. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.

**Funding:** This project was funded by the Climate Resilience Fund (Grant #17755/17757-2021-4), in support of the US Climate Resilience Toolkit.

**Institutional Review Board Statement:** Not applicable.

**Informed Consent Statement:** Not applicable.

**Data Availability Statement:** Not applicable.

**Acknowledgments:** The authors gratefully acknowledge Patty Glick and Jessie Ritter (National Wildlife Federation), who contributed to a white paper from which this manuscript developed [11]. The authors also acknowledge Ned Gardiner (National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration), Kim Rhodes (Fernleaf), and Darren Long (Climate Resilience Fund), who provided input and support for our work on the development of these NbS key considerations.

**Conflicts of Interest:** The authors declare no conflict of interest.

### **References**

