Innovation in PPE - Public Goods in Weather and Climate
Geneva, Switzerland
Abstract
Most member organizations of the WMO, i.e. the National Meteorological and Hydrometeorological Services (NHMS), are public organizations. Despite this seemingly common point of departure, the portfolios of services provided are by no means equally public, neither when comparing different NHMSs, nor when comparing services of one NHMS. Furthermore, private meteorological services operate alongside the NHMS with partly overlapping service portfolios, and in other countries strict complementarity is the guiding principle. Moreover, some sub-sets of meteorological services, such as for international aviation and shipping, are not tied to national territories. Last but not least, a significant part of the input to these services comes from international cooperative agencies and frameworks, such as ECMWF and GFCS.
For a host of reasons, the resulting meteorological service portfolios have a quite diverse character in terms of public access, pricing, resourcing, and rights for re-use. The current surge in the development of climate services and early warning systems, as well as the broadening scope and capabilities of alternative observation and service delivery technologies, pose new and renewed questions to NHMSs regarding the public status of these services. For example, the design and delivery of many climate services require elaborate collaboration, often blurring distinctions between providers and users. Combinations of impact-based forecasting, nowcasting, and early warning systems face interesting choices on combining input options regarding different observational technologies.
The indicated choices on collaboration, observational inputs, and aspired type of service-product will be guided or limited by interpretations of what is an appropriate or admissible public good. However, many NHMSs do not have the knowledge regarding the maneuvering space within public good definitions and their consequences for public access, pricing, resourcing, and rights for re-use. This webinar will shed light on the concept of a public good, its variations, and the consequences of choices regarding market organization and status of NHMSs for public access, pricing, resourcing, rights for re-use, and pace of service innovation. The theoretical explanations will be combined with references to concrete services and solutions.
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