Climate services aim to provide tailored and usable climate information to decision-makers working in climate-impacted fields such as agriculture, public health, energy, and city planning. From radio broadcasts and agricultural workshops that aid Ghanaian farmers in preparing for an upcoming planting season to the customised climate risk reports made for Finnish city planners, climate services have developed a growing influence in global climate adaptation and mitigation spheres. The field holds coproduction and user contextualisation as two core tenets of its approach, aiming to bridge usability gaps that have traditionally hindered knowledge transfer from science to action and policy. Because the climate service field is still relatively young – having first drawn global focus at the third World Climate Conference (WCC-3) in 2009 – the field remains largely unregulated, with its ethical dimensions under-explored. This thesis is among the first to purposefully engage with climate service ethics, and uses an interdisciplinary methodology that draws from both the social sciences and applied philosophy to consider what ethical issues exist in climate services, how they are perceived by climate service providers, and how they may best be addressed. Using a critical-pragmatist lens in combination with reflexive thematic analysis and applied ethics, this research explores topics of access and vulnerability, power imbalance, data quality, risk, epistemic and distributive justice, the commercialisation of knowledge, trust, credibility, unethical practice, and more. Specific ethical issues within these themes have been identified through the thematic analyses of 31 provider interviews and 95 climate service publications. The thesis ends on an examination of the field’s institutional capacity and budding ethical paradigm, with recommendations to strengthen climate services’ regulatory governance capacity through the development of an accredited climate services profession.
Research Questions:
1. What are the key ethical issues that affect climate service provision and use?
2. How do climate service providers perceive these issues?
3. Is unethical practice a problem in climate services, and if so, how should it be addressed?
