Øyvind Paasche

Reaching a more sustainable Earth relies upon the scientific community to generate critical insights and solutions, but we fear that this will not happen to the extent or in the time needed unless science itself becomes more sustainable.

Climate change yields both challenges and opportunities. In both cases, costly adaptations and transformations are necessary and desirable, and these must be based on realistic and relevant climate information. However, it is often difficult for climate scientists to communicate this information to decision-makers and stakeholders, and it can be equally difficult for such actors to interpret and put the information to use. In this essay, we discuss experiences and present recommendations for scientists producing climate services. The basis is our work in several climate service projects. One of them aimed to provide local-scale climate data for municipalities in western Norway and to explore how the data were interpreted and implemented. The project was first based solely on climate science expertise, and the participants did not have sufficient competence on coproduction and knowledge about the regulatory and political landscape in which municipalities operate. Initially, we also subscribed to an outdated idea of climate services, where knowledge providers (climate scientists) “deliver” their information to knowledge users (e.g., municipal planners). Increasingly, as stressed in the literature on coproduction of knowledge, we learned that climate service should be an iterative process where actionable information is coproduced through two-way dialogue. On the basis of these and other lessons learned the hard way, we provide a set of concrete recommendations on how to embed the idea of coproduction from the preproposal stage to beyond the end of climate service projects.

River floods holds the capasity to erode and transport sediments that are deposited whenever the discharge is reduced. In catchments that are subjected to repeated flooding, downstream lakes can therefore contain a record of past events across multiple timescales. High‐resolution core scanning analyses, such as X‐ray fluorescence (XRF) scanning and magnetic susceptibility (MS) provide data that are frequently used to detect flood layers in soft sediment archives, such as lakes, fjords and ocean basins. Deposits of past floods also can potentially reveal information about the evolution of flood events as well as source area. Here we explore ways in which subtle variability in high‐resolution data can be utilized and subsequently vetted by high‐precision measurements in order to delineate the copious information that can be extracted from soft sediment records. By combining magnetic hysteresis measurements and first‐order reversal curves (FORCs) with inductively coupled plasma optical emission spectrometer (ICP‐OES) measurements of chemical elements on 36 samples, questions about flood dynamics and variability are raised, and also sources of noise in high‐resolution scanning techniques are discussed. Specifically, we show that a lake flood record from Southern Norway containing 92 floods distributed over 10,000 years can be subdivided into two groups of floods that were generated either by spring snow melting, intense summer rainstorms, or a combination of both. The temporal evolution of this pattern shows a marked shift toward spring floods around 2000 years ago compared to the earlier part of the record.