Globally, there is increased concern of the potential impacts of extreme climate events and their impact on loss and damage of people, assets and property as a result of these events. Therefore, natural partners in using climate services to assess risk are the Global Insurance Sector, who are key implementers in increasing societies resilience and recovery of extreme events and who are integral, co-design partners in this programme. This project intends to operationalize a system, called the Oasis Loss Modelling Framework, that combines climate services with damage and loss information and provides a standardised risk assessment process that can assess potential losses, areas at most risk and quantify financial losses of modelled scenarios. We intend to prove the Oasis LMF system through undertaking a range of demonstrators linked and co-designed to ‘real’ situations and end-user communities in the insurance, municipalities and business sectors (see list of partners & collaborators). These demonstrators have already been agreed with our end-users and develop work around hydro-climatic risk (in the Danube Region), Typhoon Risk, African Farmer Risk – through using climate information to support the underwriting of micro-insurance, climate v health and climate v forest asset risk assessment. We also intend to further expand access by all sectors to the models, tools and services developed within this programme and the broader climate services sector by operationalizing an open eMarket place and matchmaking facility for catastrophe and climate data and models, tools and services and through broadening awareness in the climate modelling and end-users communities to the Framework, and the transparent and comparable standard it offers to support evidence based risk assessment and adaptation planning.

In the face of climate change, events like COVID-19 crisis with high impact in specific sectors demonstrated the importance of resilient societies. As such, it is vital to act with a level of urgency for climate change related impacts to health sector that are proportionate to the scale of the threat, be prepared and informed on the basis of the best-available science, and practise clear and consistent communications to all those involved. Therefore, in MOUNTADAPT, various regional and local authorities and community members will take the leadership to co-design, co-develop and test eleven state of the art climate adaptation solutions across the mountains biogeographical region, in Austria, Slovenia, France and Romania. A diversity of actors of the health system will also collaborate throughout the project to demonstrate the replicability of the solutions in a diversity of settings: within the Alpine mountains in Romania, outside Europe in the Pyrenees in Andora and beyond, in the continental area in Germany. MOUNTADAPT will develop robust models to better understand the impact of climate change on health (PR1). The project will cover the whole chain of response to a climate induced health emergency with monitoring tools (PR2) that will be directly linked to short term forecasts to communicate warnings (PR3) to the relevant stakeholders. An emergency management tool (PR4) will finally support health systems to optimally organise staff in crisis time. This will be supported by guidance for transforming the health system (PR5) and empowered actors with the training courses for healthcare professionals and awareness raising campaigns for citizens (PR6). Detailed monitoring protocols and impact assessment frameworks (PR7) will allow for a continuous evaluation of a range of adaptation solutions during and after the project, providing incentive for their implementation. Finally, MOUNTADAPT will provide a full guide (PR8) for the implementation of its adaptation solutions, boosting their replication in new territories and will provide feedback to the Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Authority.

Climate extremes such as heat waves or tropical storms have huge social and economic impact. The forecasting of such extreme events at the sub-seasonal time scale (from 10 days to 3 months) is challenging. Since the atmosphere and the ocean are coupled systems of enormous complexity, in order to advance sub-seasonal predictability of extreme events, it is crucial to train a new kind of interdisciplinary top-level researchers. CAFE research is structured in three WP: Atmospheric and oceanic processes, Extreme events and Tools for predictability, and brings together an interdisciplinary team of scientists. Objectives: Study of the relation between RWPs and the large scale environment, and the resulting limit of predictability; Statistical characterization of MJO events, dependence on climatic factors, and simple modelling to evaluate predictability; Development of diagnosis tools for identification and tracking of the MJO, blocking, waves and oceanic structures; Analysis of climatic changes in weather patterns and their relation with new climatic phenomena and extreme events in Europe; Estimation of probabilities for severe damages due to extreme events associated to ENSO; Validation of the hypothesis of cascades of extreme events and effects of a non-stationary climate; Estimation of exceedance probabilities for intensity of severe atmospheric events, including windstorms and hurricanes; Assessment of the response of extreme weather events for different levels of stabilized global warming and comparison with their response to internal modes of climate variability; Development of a procedure to improve the predictability of the onset of monsoon; Advanced statistical analysis of dynamic associations between SSS and extreme precipitation events; Study of predictability of large-scale atmospheric flow patterns over the Mediterranean connected to extreme weather; Systematic quantification of the predictability potential of a SWG of analogues of atmospheric circulation.

The SECIF project consists in the extension of a first preliminary attempt led in partnership with IDDRI (“Institut for sustainable development and international relations) and related to climate change vulnerability issues for companies of industrial and services sectors. This collaboration enabled to identify precise needs into a couple of companies in terms of climate products and climate expertise. Moreover, feasibility of such a partnership has been validated using some concrete studies. They have been performed for two given sectors that are strongly sensitive to the climate adaptation issue: water and energy sectors. Several discussions with other companies and sectors (transport, all sort of services, building, urban planning …) have also shown that awareness of this different actors is actually going. A lot of work is still necessary to make companies more aware and more mature on their vulnerability and to be able to express a clear and concrete demand. In addition to this “consulting” work, research institutes must organise themselves and improve coordination in order to be able, if necessary, to respond to numerous requests and provide suitable information (data, various products and/or analysis methods). Several initiatives concerning model data distribution (regional or global scale data; raw or elaborated data) and their expertise have been launched (Drias and PRODIGUER projects for example). In the other side, several industrial requests on these vulnerability topics are often related to knowledge in the scope of basic research. Answering needs to provide an additional fundamental research and integrate multidisciplinarity aspects. Currently, at a national scale, an interface cell is missing to answer these various requests. The work that we propose in SECIF is then an exploratory step towards the implementation of climate services for industrial community. They will allow to better integrate climate data and knowledge in industrial adaptation strategies.