Climate services are becoming foundational to how Europe manages climate risk.
They increasingly inform investment decisions, asset valuations, infrastructure planning, insurance, and regulatory reporting. As their influence grows, so does the need for trust, transparency, and consistency in how climate information is produced and applied.
This is the context in which Sustainaccount participated in the Climateurope2 initiative and contributed to the Joint Industry Statement on Building Trust in European Climate Services, alongside other private providers and in dialogue with leading public institutions, including the World Meteorological Organization, European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts, and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center.
The statement represents an important step toward a more mature and credible European climate services ecosystem.
Why Trust Is Now the Central Issue
The climate services market is expanding rapidly, but not without challenges.
Users are confronted with:
- diverging methodologies and assumptions
- limited comparability across providers
- opaque treatment of uncertainty
- outputs that are scientifically robust but not sufficiently decision-oriented
Two providers might both flag “high flood risk” for the same building, but only one tells you the return period and the confidence interval behind that label. That gap is exactly what erodes trust: not disagreement between providers, but the inability to tell why they disagree.
At the same time, the stakes are rising. Climate services are no longer exploratory tools; they are increasingly embedded in financial, operational, and strategic decisions with material consequences.
Without shared principles for transparency and usability, confidence in climate information risks eroding at precisely the moment when reliance on it is accelerating.
What the Joint Industry Statement Advances
The Climateurope2 joint statement brings private providers together around a shared direction, emphasizing:
- Transparency in data sources, models, scenarios, and limitations
- Comparability and interoperability, enabling users to interpret and benchmark results
- User-centric design, aligned with real decision contexts
- Capacity building and institutional ownership, ensuring climate risk competence is developed within organizations
Rather than prescribing a single technical standard, the statement promotes common foundations of trust, while preserving space for innovation and sector-specific application.
Sustainaccount’s Perspective
For Sustainaccount, this initiative aligns closely with how we approach climate risk and resilience.
Climate information creates value only when it is:
- decision-grade, not just technically sound
- explainable, rather than opaque
- context-aware, linking climate hazards with asset vulnerability and use
- explicit about uncertainty, supporting informed judgment
From our perspective, trust is built through clarity, transparency, and consistency, not through claims or complexity.
Participation in Climateurope2 reflects our commitment to contributing constructively to the evolution of climate services in Europe and to aligning private-sector innovation with the expectations of public science institutions and end users.
The Climateurope2 joint statement signals a shared recognition across public institutions and private providers that strengthening trust is essential to ensure climate information supports robust, defensible decisions, and it’s a standard we intend to keep holding ourselves to.
Visit our website or connect with us on LinkedIn to learn more about our approach to transparent, decision-grade climate risk and resilience insights.