The National Climate Service should be a lean and mean organization, anchoring a national network of knowledge centers. Its central task should be to provide a unified information/knowledge management policy while the actual monitoring, modeling and prediction are decentralized to partners at the state, other federal agencies, academe, private research organizations, and local governments. Its core competence should be networking capability. This approach will have the advantage of being cost-effective and not adding to a centralized bureaucarcy.

The proposed approach is important because of the need to establish an optimal information service that makes the best and most efficient use of available resources already available.