Advancing European climate risk assessments

This Destination contributes directly to the Strategic Plan’s Key Strategic Orientations ‘Green transition’, ‘Digital transition’ and ‘A more resilient, competitive, inclusive and democratic Europe’.

In line with the Strategic Plan, the overall expected impact of this Destination is to contribute to the “Advancing science for a transition to a climate-neutral and resilient society”.

Expected impacts:

Research should contribute to closing major knowledge gaps on the changing climate together with their associated impacts and risks, on both society and nature. It should also help develop tools to support decision-makers in designing and implementing effective mitigation and adaptation actions at various time and spatial scales while properly accounting for synergies and trade-offs with other policy objectives, such as just transition, territorial cohesion and leaving no one behind.

The main impacts to be generated by topics under this Destination are:

1. Supporting climate action (both mitigation and adaptation) in Europe and globally, through advancing climate science and the knowledge base underpinning actionable solutions, to accelerate the transition to a climate-neutral, climate-resilient and prosperous society.
2. Closing key knowledge gaps related to climate change, thereby contributing substantially to key European and international assessments such as IPCC, IPBES, EUCRA, and other initiatives such as the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project (CMIP) and the Coordinated Regional Climate Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) under the World Climate Research Programme.
3. Strengthening the European Research Area on climate change by boosting scientific excellence and capacity in an inclusive manner across the participating countries.
4. Maximising synergies between mitigation and adaptation and with other policy priorities such as biodiversity and ecosystem preservation and restoration, disaster-preparedness, digitalisation, circular economy, prosperity and competitiveness, strategic autonomy, security and resilience, just transition, and the Sustainable Development Goals by exploring co-benefits, trade-offs and potential unintended consequences of climate strategies and policy interventions.

Important components of climate science research are also addressed in other Clusters -particularly Cluster 6 – which addresses the climate-ocean-cryosphere-polar nexus and the climate-energy-land-food-water-biodiversity nexus. Efforts to foster synergies and complementarities across these research activities are strongly encouraged.

Expected Outcome:

Project results are expected to contribute to all of the following outcomes:

• The implementation of the European Adaptation Strategy, European Climate Adaptation Plan, EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change (along with other Green Deal Missions), Preparedness Union Strategy, and national adaptation efforts are informed with the latest scientific evidence and enhanced through tailored decision-support tools.
• Knowledge gaps identified in the EU Climate Risk Assessments (EUCRA)^[1] and latest IPCC assessments are narrowed, including system specific, region specific and cross-cutting gaps, so that the future EUCRAs benefit from a significant reduction of current risk assessment limitations and useful knowledge is available for various policymaking contexts.

Scope:

The development and implementation of climate adaptation strategies and plans of the EU and Member States rely on the most accurate and decision-useful assessments of climate risks that science can provide. For this purpose, the new knowledge feeding future EUCRAs will be essential. In the first EUCRA assessment, a number of gaps in terms of knowledge and action, and corresponding recommendations are highlighted to underpin more effective EU policy intervention to manage climate risks, stressing the importance of a systemic approach to climate risk assessments, adaptation and resilience and of the interaction with non-climate risk drivers, such as biodiversity loss and ecosystem degradation among others.

To support the future EUCRAs and advance adaptation and climate preparedness, actions should improve the understanding and quantification of climate risks, their underlying drivers, and reduce associated uncertainties for different systems and regions. New knowledge should be integrated to assess the risks of wildcards (high impact low probability or black swan events), crossing of tipping points and transboundary, compound and cascading risks in a way that can facilitate decision-making.

Evidence from recent experiences of materialised climate risks and the performance of adaptation efforts, encompassing the whole range from failure to success and including the role of behavioural aspects, should be mapped and analysed to improve understanding of the key factors that determine effective environmental and social resilience, preparedness and adaptation capacity^[2]. However, developing context-specific adaptation strategies is out of the scope of this topic.

The main focus is tackling knowledge gaps identified in the EUCRA. Actions should extend and improve the evidence base by retrieving inputs from relevant end-users, including local and regional authorities, and civil society organisations. While general aspects should cover the whole EU, actions should also improve understanding of sub-European and national to local specific risks. Actions should enhance methodologies and tools for risk assessment, making the outputs available through user-oriented EU portals. For these purposes, proposals should:

• Address at least two systems or sectors (e.g. ecosystems, agri-food, health, infrastructures, energy, water, economy and finance) that interact and have transboundary effects.
• Include study cases at sub-European scale. While all the cases together should cover the 4 regions defined in EUCRA^[3], some of the individual cases should also address the transnational dimension (i.e. include more than one country of the particular region).

Actions should contribute to future editions of EUCRA. Specific resources should be devoted to this purpose. Actions should leverage recent advances on other climate risk assessments and related frameworks from reliable sources (e.g. the World Climate Research Programme, WCRP).

Actions are encouraged to integrate multiple data sources and to leverage digital technologies, such as AI/ML techniques, tools, and models, including those developed under the European Commission’s Destination Earth initiative, if appropriate.

Coordination and collaboration with relevant projects from Mission Adaptation, Cluster 5 Destination 1 on Climate Science and Responses is encouraged, especially for evidence retrieval, national to local scale assessment, methodological consistency, and cross-fertilisation through project scientific boards; with projects from Cluster 3 Destination Disaster-Resilient Society for Europe for knowledge exchange and better integration of end-user perspectives, and from relevant Destinations in other Clusters. Actions are encouraged to make use of the European research infrastructures including Integrated Research Infrastructure Services for Climate Change Risks^[4], if appropriate.

[1] https://www.eea.europa.eu/en/analysis/publications/european-climate-risk-assessment

[2] See for instance the report “Safer together: A path towards a fully prepared Union - European Commission”

[3] Northern, Western, Central-eastern and Southern Europe as considered in the EUCRA report.

[4] https://www.iriscc.eu/