March 4, 2026 @ 16h00 – 17h30 CET
Our speaker of this second session was Marina Baldissera Pacchetti (University College London & Barcelona Supercomputing Center), a philosopher of science who has extensive experience in working in interdisciplinary and applied contexts. The topic of the discussion were climate services, a type of research that can be highly influential and that raises important ethical questions, yet not many philosophers have a good understanding how the provision of such services works in practice.
The starting point of the session was a paper that has been co-authored by Baldissera Pacchetti, titled “Standardisation of equitable climate services by supporting a community of practice”. The paper argues for the need to standardise climate services, it provides an overview of current standardisation efforts in Europe and summarises key recommendations regarding how to standardise in an equitable manner that resulted out of the Climateurope2 project of which the authors are part of.
The world of climate service provision is complex and not easy to grasp for laypeople (including philosophers). We therefore profited immensely from Baldissera Pacchetti’s experience with this field as she could give us valuable practical insights and at the same time connect these to more general philosophical questions. Climate services are the provision of “demand-driven, contextualised climate information to support the decision-making processes” (Doblas-Reyes et al. 2024, p. 1) of communities, organisations and institutions. Crucially, such services are nowadays offered and used both by public institutions and by private companiesFurthermore, standardisation “certificates” for such services are provided by private organisations. The aim of the EU funded Climateurope2 project is to engage a variety of stakeholders to provide recommendations for how to standardise climate services.
Our discussion touched on a number of questions on the relation between climate change mitigation and adaptation goals in the provision of climate services, the ethics of standardisation and the potential role for philosophers of science in debates thereon. A particularly central topic of our discussion was on the question if standards could help ensure that interests and values of private companies do not compromise or harm epistemic and public interests. Furthermore, we talked about how difficult it is to ensure an equitable standardisation process, even just at a European level and problems that arise from having to pay for certificates that confirm that standards were adhered to.
Organisers: Sapna Kumar and Futura Venuto