Blue-Action Communication and Dissemination Plan 2017 DRAFT SUBMISSION
Communication and Dissemination Plan
Blue-Action: Arctic Impact on Weather and Climate is a Research and Innovation action (RIA) funded by the Horizon 2020 Work programme topics addressed: BG-10-2016 Impact of Arctic changes on the weather and climate of the Northern Hemisphere.Start date: 1 December 2016. End date: 1 March 2021.
/ The Blue-Action project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement No 727852.Version 1.0 / 15 June 2017 / Authored by Thomas Dale and Peter Vangsbo, Climate-KIC and Raeanne Miller, SRSL
Contributing authors:
- Kathrin Keil (IASS)IASS
- Joan Ballester (ISGlobal)
- Christine Valentin/Julia Tasse (WOC)
- Erik Kolstad (UNIRES)
- Jan-Stefan Fritz (KDM) and John Hanus (KDM-JPI Oceans)
- Pamela Lesser (AC UoL)
- Oivin Arnes (DNV GL)
- Chiara Bearzotti (DMI)
Contents
1.0 Introduction
1.1 Introduction to Blue-Action
1.2 The Communications Strategy
2.0Target audiences
2.1 Climate services end user groups
2.1.1 Industry representative organisations
2.1.2 Established businesses
2.1.3 Emerging business actors and start-ups
2.1.4 Government and other public climate service end users
2.2 Technical end user groups – those primarily interested in the results of WP1-4
2.2.1 European and international initiatives and projects
2.2.2 Higher education course leaders and Meteorological Office Training and delivering climate science
2.2.3 Specialist scientific community
2.3 Non-technical end user groups
2.3.1 Policy makers and EU Commission services
2.3.2 Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs)
2.3.3 Indigenous groups
2.4 General audiences
2.4.1 Wider scientific community
2.4.2 The general public and wider society
3.0 Communications measures and tools
3.1 Newsletters
3.2 Project annual meeting
3.3 Project workshops
3.4 Website (D8.3)
3.5 Conference participation
3.6 Panel discussions at relevant events
3.7 Climate-KIC’s Network
3.8 World Ocean Council’s (WOC) Network
3.9 Seminars / webinars
3.10 Roadshow and meet and pitch activities – direct engagement
3.11 Match making events
3.12 Peer‐reviewed articles
3.13 Policy briefs
3.14 Gap Maps
3.15 Case studies and reports on WP5 “Developing and Valuing Climate Services”
3.16 Training modules
3.17 Online resources – fact sheets and infographics
3.18 Print material
3.19 Media coverage
3.20 Press releases
3.21 Social media
3.22 Deliverables, progress reports, grey literature and other reports
3.23 Direct engagement
How to use this document
The following document is designed to provide the members of Blue-Action’s Work Package 8 (WP8) “Communication, Dissemination, Engagement and Exploitation” with a strategic reference point through which they can coordinate their activities for the remainder of the project’s duration. The document is specifically structured into five distinct sections, intended to provide a certain level of functionality for its users.
Section 1– introduction. A brief summary of what Blue-Action aims to achieve over its duration as well as a reminder of the project’s stated top level objectives. Furthermore, this section outlines how the communication and dissemination plan will assist the project in achieving those objectives as well as defining its own objectives which are seen as crucial to fulfilling its intended function.
Section 2 – target audiences. This section is designed to provide partners with information concerning: a) who Blue-Action’s target audiences are b) the type of content each target audience should receive c) through which communication tools each target audience should be engaged and d) which partners are responsible for engaging each target audience. The communication tools –c) above – have been have been divided into both “primary tools” and “other tools”. This division is designed to distinguish between tools which are expected to be used to engage a specific target audience and those which can be used.
Section 3 – communications measures and tools. This section elaborates on the “primary tools” and “other tools” specified in in section 3. Each tool identified in section 3 is presented here and provided with a comprehensive description as to what each tool will entail in the Blue-Action context, the expected frequency of its utilization and how its successful use can be monitored. Furthermore, in some cases, indicators for monitoring are accompanied by a number in brackets, (#). In this case, the number represents a target for that which the Blue-Action consortia is expected to meet by the end of the project.
Who are work package 8:
WP8 is led by SAMS Research Services Limited (SRSL) and Climate-KIC Aps (CKIC) and includes Konsortium Deutsche Meeresforschunge.V. (KDM), DanmarksMeteorologiskeInstitut (DMI), Arctic Centre of the University of Lapland (AC UoL), Max Planck Institute for Meteorology (MPI),Uni Research (UNIRES), World Ocean Council (WOC), Technical University of Denmark (DTU-AQUA), DNV GL, FundacionPrivadaInstituto de Salud Global Barcelona (ISGlobal), a as active partners.
For the names of the staff involved, please refer to the list in the Blue-Action website.
Furthermore, all remaining partners in the Blue-Action consortia are all expected to partake to a limited extent.
If you have any questions regarding the contents of the Blue-Action Communication and Dissemination Plan please contact Peter Vangsbo, Climate-KIC at
1.0 Introduction
1.1 Introduction to Blue-Action
The Blue-Action project will improve our ability to describe, model and predict Arctic climate change and its impacts on the Northern Hemisphere’s climate, weather extremes and our ability accurately forecast it. In tandem, Blue-Action aims to bridge the gap between the climate prediction and weather forecasting community and the business sector by developing a series of novel climate services that exploit advances in the predictive capacity. By developing new climate services, we will endeavour to translate gains in scientific understanding into tangible value for a wide variety of stakeholders in the real world, including policy makers, businesses, NGOs and indigenous groups. After demonstrating the value of newly created climate services via a series of case studies, Blue-Action will upscale the benefits through clear and far-reaching communication, ensuring that results from the project stimulate sustainable growth, significantly enhance Europe’s economic competitiveness and increase businesses’ and communities’ adaptive capacity to climate change.
The project is planned to be 51 months long and kicked off on 1 December 2016 and is scheduled to finish in 28 February 2021.
The Blue-Action project has 8 top level objectives:
- Improving long range forecast skill for hazardous weather and climate events
- Enhancing the predictive capacity beyond seasons in the Arctic and the Northern Hemisphere
- Quantifying the impact of recent rapid changes in the Arctic and the Northern Hemisphere
- Improving the descriptions of key processes controlling the impact of polar amplification
- Optimizing observational systems for predictions
- Reducing and evaluating the uncertainty in prediction systems
- Fostering the capacity of key stakeholders to adapt and respond to climate change and boosting their economic growth
- Transferring of knowledge to a wide range of interested key stakeholders
1.2 The Communications Strategy
The communications strategy has been made with the purpose of maximizing the impact of the large quantities of work undertaken in the Blue-Action project. The Blue-Action project is aiming to push the boundaries of scientific understanding and translate such knowledge into “state of the art” climate services in order to create tangible value for a whole range of stakeholder groups.
To do this however, will require seamless and efficient communication between the partner consortia and wider audiences. It is intended that the communications strategy will facilitate this seamless communication by informing consortia partners:
- to whom they are expected to communicate with
- when they are expected to do so and
- through which tools it would be best to do it.
A thorough and clear understanding of this is fundamental to the success of Blue-Action and is especially the case when considering the communications channels between different partner groups; as many partners rely on output from others to begin or complete work of their own.
The primary objectives of the communication strategy are to:
- Outline what we want to accomplish with our communication activities (our communication objectives).
- To whom our association communications will be addressed (target audiences) and what our specific objectives within for this target audience is.
- How we will accomplish our objectives (tools).
- When the objectives will be met (timetable).
- How we will measure the results of ourprogram (evaluation).
2.0Target audiences
2.1 Climate services end user groups
2.1.1 Industry representative organisations
2.1.2 Established businesses
2.1.3 Emerging business actors and start-ups
2.1.4 Government and other public climate service end users
2.2 Technical end user groups – those primarily interested in the results of WP1-4
2.2.1 European and international initiatives and projects
2.2.2 Higher education course leaders and Meteorological Office Training and delivering climate science
2.2.3 Specialist scientific community
2.3 Non-technical end user groups
2.3.1 Policy makers and EU Commission services
2.3.2 Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs)
2.3.3 Indigenous groups
2.4 General audiences
2.4.1 Wider scientific community
2.4.2 The general public and wider society
2.1 Climate services end user groups
Blue-Action’s ambition is to bring scientists and the knowledge they create closer to those who will ultimately benefit. Key to achieving this ambition are the activities outlined in Blue-Action’s work package 5 (WP5) “Developing and Valuing Climate Services”, which aims to translate Blue-Action’s scientific outputs into relevant tools and resources for key end-users of climate data.
WP5 has five specific areas of interest:
- Winter tourism centers in Finland
- Temperature-related human mortality in European regions
- Extreme weather risks to maritime activities
- Climate services for marine fisheries
- RussianArctic resource extraction
from which specific stakeholders have been identified to co-develop climate services.
The co-development of climate services between scientists and end-users ensures that the resulting climate services are highly relevant and have maximum value to stakeholder with an interest in each area. With this in mind, our role is to publicise opportunities presented by the results of WP5 to end users beyond those directly involved in the co-development of climate services. As such, we aim to bring the outputs of WP5 to a wider audience and to encourage the cross-fertilisation of ideas, inspire new services and develop additional synergies between organisations working in the public and the private sector.
Goals of communications measures:
Given that objectives 7 and 8 of the Blue-Action project are to foster the adaptive capacity of key stakeholders and transfer knowledge to a wide range of interested key stakeholders it is vital to:
-Encourage as much interest in participation as possible from end-user groups outside those directly included in work package 5; and,improve the level of climate literacy within organisations.
-Takethe successes from the case studies and make them relevant to a wider audience within and outside of the specific fields of interest.
2.1.1 Industry representative organisations
Who are they: Industry representative organisations are bodies or committees who represent and work for the benefit of industries, often within a certain geography. Those relevant to Blue-Action will be those organisations who represent industries directly affected by long-term changes in weather and climate in the Arctic region and Northern Europe.
Language register: Technical but industry dependent. Industry representatives are likely to be competent across certain fields to the extent in which it directly affects their business agenda. For example, representatives of resource extraction industries are likely to have a good knowledge of weather phenomena associated with Blue-Action.However, it is doubtful that they will possess an understanding about how information and data transfer may occur between proposed climate services and their own systems.
Objective:Inform, train, engage, and persuade. One of the main aims of Blue-Action is to “bridge the gap” between climate science and the wider society. The most direct way in which Blue-Action seeks to do this is through WP5, which specifically works across five case studies in five different industries to produce climate services capable of enhancing the way in which established weather-dependent industries operate, enabling potential for further sustainable growth. Thus, the objectives of communications are to engage a wide variety of relevant industries with Blue-Action’s project and outcomes; to create a commercial demand for any products/services developed; and to ensure weather-dependent industries quickly understand the project objectives and outcomes as they apply to their business.
Potential contents:
-Project results and implications tailored for an industry audience
-Information about end user products and services produced
-Identified opportunities for further partnership or collaboration
-Training materials and resources developed from the results of WP5 that maximise their capacity to understand and adapt to climate change (likely to be in the form of documentation and videos)
Primary tools:
-Case studies and reports from WP5
-Print, online and social media content tailored to a business audience
-Panel discussions at relevant business events
-Direct engagement via roadshows and or ‘meet and pitch’
-Project/product/service specification sheets
-Training modules
-World Ocean Council’s network
-Conference participation
Other tools that can be utilized:
-Website
-Match making events
-Climate-KIC’s network
-Annual project meetings
-Press releases
-Partner newsletters
-Project annual meetings
-Direct engagement
Responsibility:
Leads: WOC, Climate-KIC
Involvement: DTU AQUA, SRSL, DNV GL, UNIRES, DMI, IASS and AC UoL
2.1.2 Established businesses
Who are they: Established businesses who operate in fields which are directly affected by climate change and weather forecasting. These businesses can be of different sizes, some of them are large, often multi-national companies likely to possess a long operational history and large amounts of institutional competencies, whilst others are small or mid-sized enterprises, and though well established, might still rely on their personal experience to understand weather/climate and base their business decisions accordingly.
Language register: Mostly technical but industry dependent. Company representatives are likely to be competent across certain fields to the extent in which directly affects their business. For example, representatives from maritime industries are likely to have a good knowledge of weather phenomena associated with Blue-Action. However, they are unlikely to have expertise in the possibilities for information and data transfer between proposed climate services and their own systems.
Objective: Engage, persuade and inform. One of the main aims of Blue-Action is to “bridge the gap” between climate science and wider society. The most direct way in which Blue-Action seeks to do this is through WP5, which specifically works across five case studies in five different industries to produce climate services capable of enhancing the way in which established weather-dependent industries operate and enabling potential for further growth. Thus, the objectives of communications within this function are to engage a wide variety of relevant industries with Blue-Action’s project and outcomes; to create a commercial demand for any products/services developed; and to ensure weather-dependent industries quickly understand the project objectives and outcomes as they apply to their business.
Potential contents:
-Project results and implications tailored for an industry audience
-Information about end user products and services produced
-Identified opportunities for further partnership or collaboration with business
-Training materials and resources developed from the results of WP5 that maximise their capacity to understand and adapt to climate change (likely to be in the form of documentation and videos)
Primary tools:
-Case studies and reports from WP5
-Print, online and social media content tailored to a business audience
-Direct engagement via roadshows and or ‘meet and pitch’
-Match-making events
-Training modules
-Conference participation
-Panel discussions at relevant business events
-World Ocean Council’s network
-Climate-KIC's network
Other tools that can be utilized:
-Website
-Policy briefings
-Online resources – fact sheets, infographics and recorded workshop
-Press releases
-Partner newsletters
Responsibility:
Lead(s): WOC, Climate-KIC
Involvement: DTU AQUA, SRSL, DNV GL, UNIRES, DMI, IASS, AC UoL
2.1.3 Emerging business actors and start-ups
Who are they:Emerging businesses and start-ups are smaller or fledgling companies who donot necessarily have large geographical operating areas, and donot possess a long operational history and/or large amounts of institutional competencies. Often, they have very specific competencies which put them at the forefront of the industry sector, however as result may lack broad competencies across the business landscape.
Language register: Technical, but dependent on the function and expertise of the start-up/newer business. Newer businesses and start-ups in particular often possess in-depth technical knowledge across specific areas, but can be lacking in others. Communications, therefore, should be sensitive to the SME and start-up knowledge base, and should aim to increase engagement with this group of stakeholders while making best use of communication resources across all groups within this target audience.
Objective: Engage, persuade and inform.The objectives of communication here are to engage a wide variety of relevant industries; create commercialdemand for any products and or services developed; and ensure that weather-dependent industries, or those involved with weather dependent industries, quickly understand the project objectives and outcomes as they apply to their business. By engaging SME’s and start-ups around the climate services developed in WP5, we aim to broaden the range of businesses who can utilize, build upon and enhance the results of Blue-Action WP5, enabling wider impact and societal benefits.