Co‐Producing Climate Services for California's Energy Sector

Climate change has made the energy sector's provision of safe, cost‐effective, and reliable services more difficult. Integrating climate data into decision making can improve the sector's ability to anticipate and navigate these risks. However, despite the proliferation of climate data and services, their practical use remains low. A rich literature examines the existence of barriers to climate data use in planning and adaptation, but few studies trace barriers back to their often invisible organizational and institutional factors. Here, we describe how we identified and addressed these factors during the co‐production of the Cal‐Adapt: Analytics Engine, a state‐level climate services platform for California's energy sector. Through three years of iterative engagements with scientists, practitioners, and decision makers, we identified four underlying root causes that inhibited climate data use in the sector: (a) institutional legacies within decision‐making processes; (b) limited experience with iterative, engaged practices within scientific processes; (c) rigidly constructed and highly tailored climate services; and (d) a lack of clarity on how climate guidance should be developed. We corroborate existing research that emphasizes the need for data to fit decision contexts but also highlight the potential drawbacks of over‐tailoring data to the current moment. Flexible climate services are needed that recognize the evolving nature of climate science, increasing practitioner expertise, and advances in climate policy. Our research demonstrates how a highly interactive, state‐level co‐production process helped overcome some of these issues to create more actionable climate data, tools, and guidance.