As Europe works to define its future priorities for ocean and water research and innovation, CMCC highlights a key challenge: ensuring that research makes its way into practice. Its contributions to the two future strategies call for integrated, long-term approaches that can turn scientific knowledge into actionable solutions for resilience.

Ocean and water are at the centre of some of Europe’s most pressing challenges. Climate change, extreme events, water scarcity, biodiversity loss and growing pressure on ecosystems are increasing the need for better knowledge and more effective tools to support decisions.

At the same time, Europe is working to strengthen its research and innovation capacity in these areas, with the aim of better connecting scientific knowledge, technological development and its practical application. The European Commission is currently developing a future Ocean Research and Innovation Strategy and Water Resilience Research and Innovation Strategy, intended to help coordinate research priorities and investments across Europe.

As part of this process, CMCC has submitted its views on both strategies, drawing on its expertise in ocean and climate modelling, observations, impact assessment, environmental economics and climate services.

Connecting ocean science, observations and action

In its contribution to the future European Ocean Research and Innovation Strategy, CMCC highlights the need to strengthen the links between research, observations and decision-making.

One priority is to give multidisciplinary research institutions a more structural role in the science-policy cycle. Long-term relationships between researchers and public authorities, CMCC argues, are essential to ensure that increasingly detailed information on climate risks can effectively support decisions on coastal resilience, adaptation and sustainable maritime activities.

Another priority is the development of high-resolution, coupled and AI-enabled ocean modelling, particularly to better understand and anticipate extreme events such as sea-level rise and marine heatwaves. By combining ocean dynamics with waves, sediments, biogeochemistry and freshwater inputs, these modelling systems can provide a more complete picture of the pressures affecting coastal areas.

The contribution also stresses the importance of maintaining stable and continuous ocean observations, particularly in coastal areas where gaps remain significant. Data from satellites and in-situ networks are essential to initialise and validate forecasting and modelling systems, while interoperable data infrastructures are needed to ensure that information can be shared and reused across different services and platforms.

An anticipatory strategy for water resilience

For water, CMCC’s contribution starts from a broader perspective: water cannot be treated as an isolated policy sector.

Water underpins agriculture, energy, industry, health, ecosystems and territorial development, while climate change is already putting these connections under increasing pressure. CMCC therefore advocates for a systemic approach covering the entire source-to-sea continuum, from the atmosphere and freshwater systems to coastal and marine environments.

A central recommendation is to move from “predict-then-act” to anticipatory planning. Rather than using climate and hydrological information only to predict what may happen, research should also help decision-makers test whether their choices remain robust under different possible future scenarios.

This means connecting different time horizons, from nowcasting and seasonal forecasting to decadal predictions and long-term projections, while linking physical climate and hydrological processes to their socio-economic consequences.

The Euro-Mediterranean region, already one of the areas most exposed to water-related climate risks, can play an important role in this transition. According to CMCC, its experience with drought, water scarcity, reuse, desalination and other non-conventional water resources makes the Mediterranean a valuable forward-looking laboratory for developing and testing approaches to water resilience.

From research to operational use

A common thread runs through both CMCC contributions: research needs to make its way into practice.

For the ocean, CMCC points to the need for structured pathways that can take research results, climate services and digital tools from pilot projects to operational use by coastal authorities, ports, marine protected areas and other stakeholders. The CoastPredict programme, coordinated by CMCC, provides one example of how local observing and modelling systems can be tested in real-world settings and replicated across different coastal environments.

For water, CMCC highlights the potential of living labs, experimental catchments and demonstration sites as places where scientific solutions can be tested not only for their technological performance, but also for their organisational, regulatory and societal readiness, with the goal of shortening the distance between scientific knowledge and the decisions that need to be made.

Read CMCC’s contributions:

CMCC views on the Ocean Research and Innovation Strategy
CMCC’s views on the Water Resilience Research and Innovation Strategy