Research projects

Research

ESA CMUG: Climate Modelling Users Group

ESA has established the Climate Modelling User Group (CMUG) to place a climate system perspective at the centre of its Climate Change Initiative (CCI) programme, and to provide a dedicated forum through which the Earth observation data community and the climate modelling and reanalysis community can work closely together. CMUG will work with the Essential Climate Variable CCI projects to achieve this goal.

ESiWACE3 – Center of excellence for weather and climate phase 3

Extreme weather events and climate change are two of the main threats for society of the 21st century. Extreme weather events caused over 500 thousand casualties and over 2 trillion USD economic damages in the past 20 years. A failure of climate change mitigation and adaptation targets is ranked among the leading threats to global society. At the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, leaders from 194 countries of the world unanimously acknowledged the serious threat posed by anthropogenic emissions of greenhouse gases. Society must now become resilient to changes in climate over coming decades, which requires making quantitative estimates for future changes of weather patterns and climate extremes. This includes exceptional weather events such as violent windstorms and flash floods, but also persistent anomalies in planetary-scale circulation patterns, which lead to pervasive flooding in some regions and seasons, and long-lived drought and extremes of heat in others. Numerical models of the Earth system represent the most important tool to anticipate and assess these kinds of threats. One of the main factors that is limiting the skill of these models is limited resolution, and resolution, in turn, is limited by computational power that can be leveraged by these models. The first two phases of the ESiWACE Centre of Excellence (COE) have pushed the resolution of global Earth system models to unprecedented levels. This includes the first global atmosphere models that were able to run at ~1 km resolution in the first phase of ESiWACE and coupled atmosphere/ocean models that were able to

EUCRA – The European Climate Risk Assessment

This contract will aim at carrying out the European Climate Risk Assessment (EUCRA). EUCRA will address the climate risks in Europe and will establish a European baseline of climate risks on which countries can build on their national assessments. 

EUNICE – Debiasing the uncertainties of climate stabilization ensembles

Mathematical models have become central tools in global environmental assessments. To serve society well, climate change stabilization assessments need to capture the uncertainties of the deep future, be statistically sound and track near-term disruptions. Up to now, conceptual, computational and data constraints have limited the quantification of uncertainties of climate stabilization pathways to a narrow set, focused on the current century. The statistical interpretation of scenarios generated by multi-model ensembles is problematic due to availability biases and model dependencies. Scenario plausibility assessments are scant. Simplified, single-objective decision criteria frameworks are used to translate decarbonization uncertainties into decision rules whose understanding is not validated. 

FIND: Finance and Innovation to couple Negative emissions and sustainable Development

Current global climate action is deeply insufficient to deliver the objectives of the Paris Agreement and containing global warming to 1.5 °C will likely require the deployment of carbon dioxide removals. However, the technologies to sequestrate and store carbon from the atmosphere are currently immature, risky, and highly questioned. Understanding the effective diffusion potential of carbon removal methods and their socioeconomic and environmental impacts is pivotal to design future climate action. FIND will help to develop an innovative framework to assess the feasibility and social desirability of limiting global warming through the diffusion of negative emission technologies. It aims to ensure that negative emission technologies act as an enabler, not a barrier, of long-run sustainable development. The project will evaluate climate and non-climate policies to create robust, no-regret policy portfolios supporting a rapid and sustainable path to a net-zero society. FIND will be of high relevance for public policy and civil society, especially considering Europe’s commitment to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 while spurring green and inclusive growth.

FIRELOGUE – Cross-sector Wildfire Risk Management Dialogue

Wildfire risk management (WFRM) is characterised by complex interdependencies between vegetation conditions, climate, human behavior and socioeconomic development and inequalities. In addition, different institutions and organisations involved on WFRM may have diverging interests, needs, policies and practices, with responsibilities not always aligned with the necessary resources. Thus, WFRM can be subject to conflicts between different ends in which different stakeholders with different interests and goals clash. FIRELOGUE coordinates and supports the Innovation Actions funded under H2020 calls by integrating their findings across stakeholder and fire management phases to deconstruct conflicting interests and real or perceived injustices, providing a space for deliberating in a just and inclusive way, to co-develop integrated strategies to overcome these conflicts.

FOODCLIC – Integrated urban FOOD policies. Developing sustainability Co-benefits, spatial Linkages, social Inclusion and sectoral Connections to transform food systems in city-regions

Europe’s urban areas face significant challenges to ensure the availability and consumption of healthy, affordable, safe and sustainably produced food. Such challenges converge within local food environments but are often neglected by public planners. Promising initiatives taken by municipalities to change the architecture of food choice often fail to become embedded in the wider policy context and to reach deprived and vulnerable groups. Key factors responsible for this are: (1) siloed ways of working and (2) fragmentation of knowledge on facilitators and barriers related to food system transformation. These factors hinder the development and implementation of integrated urban food policies. FOODCLIC aims to contribute to urban food environments that make healthy and sustainable food available, affordable and attractive to all citizens (including deprived and vulnerable groups).

FutureMARES – Climate Change and Future Marine Ecosystem Services and Biodiversity

FutureMARES provides socially and economically viable nature-based solutions (NBS) for climate change (CC) adaptation and mitigation to safeguard these ecosystems’ natural capital, biodiversity and services. The program advances understanding of the links between species and community traits, ecological functions and ecosystem services as impacted by CC by analysing the best available data from monitoring programs and conducting targeted experiments and beyond state-of-the-art modelling. Ensemble physical-biogeochemical projections will identify CC hotspots and refugia. Shifts in the distribution and productivity of keystone, structural and endangered species and the consequences for biodiversity will be projected within different CC-NBS scenarios to reveal potential ecological benefits, feedbacks and trade-offs. Novel, social-ecological vulnerability assessments will rank the severity of CC impacts on various ecosystem services and dependent human communities. Complementary analyses at real- world demonstration sites will inform managers and policy-makers on the economic costs and tradeoffs of NBS.

GEOCEP – Global Excellence in Modeling Climate and Energy Policies

GEOCEP is a project on climate and energy policy modelling and an international network for knowledge transfers. GEOCEP identifies institutional and political obstacles to implementing the first-best solutions to control for the global carbon externality and, consequently, investigates an array of second-best energy and climate mitigation policies focused on increasing energy efficiency, on reducing emissions and related environmental and health externalities and on promoting renewable energy. GEOCEP has is funded from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme.

GLORAN – COPERNICUS MARINE – PRODUCTION PROVISION AND ANALYSIS OF REANALYSIS PRODUCTS FOR THE GLOBAL OCEAN

This is a supply of oceanic reanalysis products that will be integrated into the Copernicus marine service. The service will provide at different times and on a monthly basis,  physical (ocean and sea ice) and biological (micronekton) model products for the global ocean. The quality of these reanalyses will be analyzed and the relative performances compared in the context of the developing indicators of ocean variability.  

GoNEXUS – Innovative tools and solutions for governing the water-energy-food-ecosystems NEXUS under global change

GoNEXUS aims to develop a framework for designing and assessing innovative solutions for an efficient and sustainable coordinated governance of the water-energy-food-ecosystems (WEFE) nexus. Solutions will combine policy changes and soft path options with technical and infrastructure measures for a more resilient future. To achieve this objective, the project will build a powerful model toolbox and creative participatory Nexus Dialogues. The model toolbox will include forefront global/continental and river basin models, innovatively establishing a functional link between them. At global and continental scales, the toolbox will include the individual WEFE element models CAPRI (food, agri-environment), LISFLOOD-EPIC and PCR-GLOBWB (water), PRIMES and PROMETHEUS (energy), GLOBIO (environment), and GEM-E3 (macroeconomics), some of them used in EU policies. River basin models will include nested strategic WEFE management models (including behavioral modelling) and hydrological simulation models to expand the analysis of resilience at basin scale, including impacts on ecosystems. Nexus Dialogues will co- design scenarios, models, and solutions for a joint governance of the WEFE nexus. The solutions will be evaluated using the model toolbox through a set of novel nexus indicators and criteria (based on relevant SDGs metrics) to assess trade-offs between water status, and food and energy security. GoNEXUS will be applied at global and EU levels and to six river basins representing different features and WEFE challenges in Europe (Danube, Como, Jucar, Tagus-Segura) and Africa (Zambezi, Senegal). The innovative combination of models and Nexus Dialogues will provide more accurate evaluations of future scenarios, enabling knowledge sharing and brokerage, and improving WEFE

GreenHeritage: The impact of Climate Change on the Intangible Cultural Heritage

GreenHeritage aims at developing a holistic, innovative and inclusive approach toward direct and indirect climate change (CC) impact on intangible cultural heritage (ICH), a topic which has received little or no attention at all. GreenHeritage is a large-scale project that fosters innovation through practice, by researching and adopting a new methodology that touches on different sectors, and policy, by disseminating research findings and impacting policies at national and European levels. The project will be implemented in 5 European countries (Belgium, Greece, Italy, Latvia and Spain).

GRINS – Growing Resilient, INclusive and Sustainable

The green, digital and sustainable mobility transitions and the associated societal transformations require a far from trivial process of adaptation. The actors of the system, firms, households and public administrations, face complex and changing environments and need to make choices under uncertainty, often under limited information and often facing limitations in their ability to process it and use if proficiently. To respond to these needs – GRINS – Growing Resilient, INclusive and Sustainable Extended Partnership will offer tools to support fundamental and applied research for firms and households and for policy analysis and evaluation of the actions of public administrations. The project is designed following the priorities set by the Italian National Research Plan (PNR) and in strict adherence with the fundamental underline goals that inspire the whole EU-NRRP action: favouring resilient, inclusive, and sustainable growth.

IDAlert – Infectious Disease decision-support tools and Alert systems to build climate Resilience to emerging health Threats

Climate change is one of several drivers of recurrent outbreaks and geographical range expansion of zoonotic infectious diseases in Europe. Policy and decision-makers need tailored monitoring of climate-induced disease risk, and decision support tools for timely early warning and impact assessment for proactive preparedness and timely responses. The abundance of open data in Europe allows the establishment of more effective, accessible, and cost-beneficial prevention and control responses. IDAlert will co-create novel policy-relevant pan-European indicators that track past, present, and future climate-induced disease risk across hazard, exposure, and vulnerability domains at the animal, human and environment interface. Indicators will be sub-national and disaggregated through an inequality lens. We will generate tools to assess cost-benefit of climate change adaptation and mitigation measures across sectors and scales, to reveal novel policy entry points and opportunities. Surveillance, early warning and response systems will be co-created and prototyped to increase health system resilience at regional and local levels, and explicitly reduce socio-economic inequality. Indicators and tools will be co-produced through multilevel engagement, innovative methodologies, existing and new data streams and citizen science, taking advantage of intelligence generated from selected hotspots in Spain, Greece, The Netherlands, Sweden, and Bangladesh that are experiencing rapid urban transformation and heterogeneous climate-induced disease threats. For implementation, IDAlert has assembled European authorities in climate modelling, infectious disease epidemiology, social sciences, environmental economics, One Health and EcoHealth. Further, by engaging critical stakeholders from the start, IDAlert will ensure long-lasting impacts on EU climate policy, and provide new evidence and tools for the

InBestSoil: Monetary valuation of soil ecosystem services and creation of initiatives to invest in soil health: setting a framework for the inclusion of soil health in business and in the policy making process

InBestSoil is a project funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme involving twenty partners from ten countries, with very different profiles (universities, small and medium-sized enterprises, consultancies, farmers, and NOGs, among others). The project will provide data, evidence, tools and models to assess how investment in soil health can contribute to the transition to a long-term resilient and sustainable use of soil, using 6 lighthouses and 3 living labs, which provides a total of 9 study areas across 4 biogeographic regions from Europe (Boreal, Continental, Atlantic, Mediterranean), and different land uses (agriculture, forest, urban, mining), as models for co-creation and co-design (multi-actor approach, responsible research and innovation and open science).

interTwin – An interdisciplinary Digital Twin Engine for Science

interTwin co-designs and implements the prototype of an interdisciplinary Digital Twin Engine (DTE), an open-source platform that provides generic and tailored software components for modelling and simulation to integrate application-specific Digital Twins (DTs). Its specifications and implementation are based on a co-designed conceptual model – the DTE blueprint architecture – guided by the principles of open standards and interoperability. The ambition is to develop a common approach to the implementation of DTs that is applicable across the whole spectrum of scientific disciplines and beyond to facilitate developments and collaboration.  Co-design involves DT use cases for High energy physics, Radio astronomy, Astroparticle physics, Climate research, and Environmental monitoring, whose complex requirements are expected to significantly advance the state of the art of modelling and simulation using heterogeneous distributed digital infrastructures, advanced workflow composition, real-time data management and processing, quality and uncertainty tracing of models, data fusion and analytics. As a result, a consolidation of software technologies supporting research will emerge.  The validation of the technology with multiple infrastructure facilities will boost the accessibility of users to technological capacity and the support of AI uptake in research. interTwin builds on the capacities of experts from pan-European research infrastructures and the long tail of science, an Open-Source Community of technology providers that will deliver TRL 6/7 capabilities to implement the interdisciplinary DTE, experts of the European Centre of Excellence in Exascale Computing, and infrastructure providers from the EGI Federation, PRACE and EuroHPC supporting data and compute intensive science. interTwin key exploitable results will

Invest4Nature – Promoting investments in NBS and accelerating market uptake by gaining a better understanding of the economic performance of NBS, considering climate mitigation and risk reduction

Currently there is a range of Nature-based solutions (NBS) emerging mostly with strong public funding elements, but a market for NBS has not yet emerged. While mostly small scale NBS are implemented as pilots for urban resilience to climate change the full range of economic and societal benefits for NBS are not systematically understood and mapped and are not sufficiently used to back the business and investment case for NBS. The numerous benefits may include mitigation and adaptation to climate change (including the reduction of urban heat island effect and flood mitigation), reduction of pollution, improved biodiversity and ecosystem services, increased well-being for citizens, including physical and mental health or recreation, social cohesion, and community building. While effort for climate change mitigation and adaptation are increasing, the role of NBS in this context is not well understood. In particular, risk reduction of NBS for the private and public insurance sector has not yet been systematically included in economic valuation of NBS. Holistic understanding of benefits and benefit flows however are important for the society including upscaling and maximising the benefits achievable with NBS and activation financing for NBS. 

IRIDE (Precursor phase)

The IRIDE program is an innovative project undertaken by the Italian government, in collaboration with the European Space Agency (ESA), to leverage resources from the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (PNRR).  The objective of the project is to implement a service portfolio, ready for operations, providing Geospatial Products and to set up the digital tools and the operational scenarios for the provision of the services to IRIDE users, by also taking care of designing and developing suitable exploitation solutions and interfaces with User Operational Systems exploiting the IRIDE Services outputs.  As a result, IRIDE Marketplace will host the service value chains developed within the Service Segment and guarantee a single access point for the Users. 

LIFE21-IPC-IT-LIFE CLIMAX PO | CLIMate Adaptation for the PO river basin district

CLIMAX PO is a project funded by a LIFE grant of the European Commission. CLIMAX PO brings together most national and regional and some of the local authorities playing a role in implementing the Italian strategy on adaptation in the Po River Basin, an area of 74.000 km2 , with 3.200 local authorities, 16 million inhabitant and generating 40% of the Italian GDP.  CLIMAX PO is led by the National Po River Basin District Authority (ADBPO) chaired directly by the Italian Minister for the Environment and responsible for the implementation of the NAS at district level. The consortium covers the whole geographical river basin, all levels of Governance (National, Regional, Local) and necessary competences with 3 major research institutes on board.            

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