Climate Services Participatory Assessment Tool: Final capstone presentation
This capstone presentation describes the development and pilot of the Climate Services Participatory Assessment Tool (CS-PAT), a participatory framework intended to assess the strength, maturity, inclusivity, and sustainability of climate-service systems. Working with the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT and the CGIAR Climate Action Science Program, the Columbia Climate School student team tested the methodology in Kenya and Nigeria. The project combined literature and document review, climate-services value-chain mapping, stakeholder prioritization, semi-structured interviews, and exploratory SWOT and thematic analysis. Sixty-seven stakeholders were prioritized, 17 organizations were contacted, and nine interviews were conducted across climate-information producers, translators, disseminators, and users—seven in Kenya and two in Nigeria.
The pilot identified co-production, community engagement, and trusted local relationships as important strengths. It also revealed persistent challenges related to volatile and donor-dependent financing, limited data granularity, technical and staffing constraints, weak outcome tracking, fragile institutional memory, and barriers to last-mile delivery. Although Indigenous knowledge and stakeholder feedback were widely valued, they were rarely documented, formally integrated, or connected to measurable outcomes. Digital access, connectivity, language, literacy, and affordability further affected whether climate information reached and benefited intended users.
The presentation concludes that CS-PAT is a useful structure for institutional learning and methodological discovery but is not yet a validated evaluation or scoring tool. Recommended next steps include simplifying and tailoring the interview protocol, increasing the participation of direct users and media organizations, introducing evidence and validation standards, mapping institutional networks, tracing climate products across the full value chain, and pairing qualitative interviews with a structured survey. An evidence-based maturity framework is proposed as a more appropriate near-term objective than numerical scoring.