Climate services, often refers as decision support tools, are developed to provide information with a view to aid in decision making and policy planning for adaptation due to climate variability and change. This study investigated different publicly available climate services and decision support tools based on previously proposed evaluation framework. This evaluation framework originally consists of four design elements which are divided into nine evaluation metrics for this study. These evaluation metrics are: identification of decision making context, discussion of the role of climate information in decision making, discussion of non-climatic factors, uncertainty of the data presented, accessibility of information, discussion on the development process, sustainability/ ongoing process, discussion of funding sources, and evaluation of the tool through survey, modeling or contingent valuation method. Tools were then given "High", "Medium", and "Low" score for each of the criterion. A total of 19 tools were evaluation for this study. Tools performed relatively well in "characteristics, tailoring, and communication of the climate information" and "governance, process, and structure of the climate service" whereas they got average scores in "problem identification and the decision-making context" and "value of the service provided". Additionally, four case study evaluation of tools showed detail evaluation of how the tools performed against each of the criterion. The results of this study showed the relative strengths and weakness of the evaluated tools which can be used to improve existing climate services to aid in adaptation decision needs for climate change. This will also help in better decision making and policy planning for different sectors impacted by the changing climate. / Master of Science / Climate services, often refers as decision support tools, are developed to provide information with a view to aid in decision making and policy planning for adaptation due to the adverse impacts caused by climate variability and change. This study investigated a total of 19 publicly available climate services and decision support tools based on previously proposed evaluation framework. This evaluation framework originally consists of four design elements which further classified into nine evaluation metrics and each of tools were given "High", "Medium", and "Low" score against these criteria. These metrics are: identification of decision making context, discussion of the role of climate information in decision making, discussion of non-climatic factors, uncertainty of the data presented, accessibility of information, discussion on the development process, sustainability/ ongoing process, discussion of funding sources, and evaluation of the tool through survey, modeling or contingent valuation method. Evaluated tools performed better than average in terms of uncertainty of the data presented, accessibility of information, discussion on the development process, sustainability/ ongoing process, discussion of funding sources, and feedback/ evaluation criteria whereas they performed below average in problem identification and decision making context, discussion of the role of climate information in decision making, and discussion of non-climatic factors. Four case study evaluation were also presented in this study for better understanding of how the evaluation process works for the tools. The results of this study provide an insight about the relative strengths and weakness of the evaluated tools and these can be used to improve existing climate services tools. This will also help in better decision making and policy planning for different sectors that are being impacted by the changing climate.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:VTETD/oai:vtechworks.lib.vt.edu:10919/102124 |
| Date | 28 January 2021 |
| Creators | Jahan, Momtaz |
| Contributors | Biological Systems Engineering, Shortridge, Julie Elizabeth, Bukvic, Anamaria, Sridhar, Venkataramana |
| Publisher | Virginia Tech |
| Source Sets | Virginia Tech Theses and Dissertation |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | ETD, application/pdf, application/pdf |
| Rights | In Copyright, http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/ |
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