Developing climate information portals with users : Promises and pitfalls

The priority of climate change on political and research agendas fluctuates but got a recent boost after the 2015 UNFCCC Paris Agreement. The amount of climate data is surging and so is the number of climate information portals. Portal developers usually aim at serving ‘‘users” and therefore consult them. But how useful are the resulting portals really? And for whom? How effective was the involvement of users in developing the portal? This paper aims to provide some answers to these questions. Reflections which have been carried out in this paper are based on the situation in Europe, building on experience in a number of European projects, in particular the CLIPC project (Climate Information Portal for Copernicus), a ‘‘pre-operational” research project for Copernicus.