Regional climate information: Can we provide skilful regional climate predictions at seasonal to decadal time scales and reliable and actionable long term regional climate change projections?

Many aspects of human societies, such as food production, water availability and management, health, energy production and consumption etc., depend critically on climate variability and change. While some countries have the resources and infrastructure necessary to respond to the variability of climate, others are more vulnerable, to the point that large climate anomalies and extremes can cause enormous loss of life and resources, thereby constituting a substantial societal and environmental stress. It is thus important that climate information is provided to relevant stakeholders in order to allow them to properly design and implement response policies. This increasing recognition has given impetus to the development of many climate service activities in different countries and, on the global scale, to the launch of a Global Framework for Climate Services (GFCS) by the World Meteorological Organization (WMO).