Open Collections

Abstract

Climate services aim to inform adaptation to a warmer world, but their effectiveness depends not only on the data or information and how it is provided, but its interpretation and application in context. This qualitative study explores how climate service users and providers in Canada engage with long-term climate projections to support adaptation. Canada is an example of a mature and ongoing landscape of service delivery, contrasting with project-based services often presented in the literature. Thirty practitioner interviews were analyzed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis, with a focus on how understanding and use is shaped by context. Six themes, Digital, Relational, Credibility, Subjectivity, Transactional, and Systems, from the interviews, are conceptualized as Levers of Influence, positioned along a gradient from areas where climate services can act directly to support decision-making, to broader external and systemic constraints which require more indirect or positional approaches. Four key insights emerged: users are often decision-linkers rather than decision-makers; credibility substitutes for certainty in the face of uncertainty; relational work is foundational, not auxiliary; and service continuity reinforces traction. This study extends the climate services literature by illuminating how meaning is socially produced through practical judgements and organizational systems. The findings illustrate the value of ongoing climate services provision, such as those in Canada, as sustained infrastructure crucial for supporting meaningful climate adaptation over time, rather than as discrete interventions or technical fixes. The study ends by examining three cross-cutting areas suggested via the practitioner interviews, and explored as primers for further work. The areas contextualize an historic, a contemporary and a future friction: how climate services differ from weather services, how commercial actors are shaping services, and how artificial intelligence is poised to disrupt climate modelling and service delivery.