Abstract for: The Importance of Climate Information Services in OACPS Countries

The Organization of African, Caribbean, and Pacific States (OACPS) has chartered a system dynamics (SD) project to model the socio-economic benefits (SEB) of climate services in its constituent countries. The SEB model is intended to show how the climate services value chain builds capacity for responding to the impacts of climate change. This paper describes Phases 1 and 2 of the project and the objectives for Phase 3. As noted in a recent ClimSA publication [3] “timely and actionable weather and climate services are fundamental to progress on key global and regional national policy agendas.” A lengthy section entitled ‘System Dynamics Models of Environment, Energy, and Climate Change in Dangerfield[4, Section III] emphasizes the role of SD models for this purpose. In this section we describe the model constructed to quantify the benefits of climate information services (CIS). For each scenario, the model first calculates the value added in each producing sector, net of supplies usage and consumption of capital per sector. GDP is then calculated as the sum of the value added in all of the producing sectors, with the value add from abatement and adaption actions included in the GDP calculation for the [NDC Climate] scenario. The results show that it is possible to show that the level of CIS can make a value add contribution to the country’s response to climate change. The level of CIS contributes in two ways: 1) by directly informing the production sectors, raising the country’s GDP, and 2) by increasing the level of economic activity with abatement and adaptation actions.