Even if climate change mitigation objectives agreed in Paris are met, sea level will rise at least by 0.3 to 0.6m in 2100 and then continue rising for centuries. The potential impacts for coastal flooding are a major source of concern for Europe because many infrastructures are located close to shorelines or in low-lying areas. Broad scale coastal climate services and platforms available today have successfully addressed the need to raise awareness on mitigation. However, an authoritative, consistent and decision oriented platform is still missing to meet the needs of adaptation practitioners concerned with (1) the routine identification of coastal territories at risk from innundation, (2) coastal land use planning or (3) maintaining coastal infastructure services. The Coastal Climate Core Service (CoCliCo) project aims at informing decision-making on coastal risk and adaptation, by delivering an open web-platform exploring dominant risk drivers, adjusting visualisation and analysis techniques to local decision contexts, and combining relevant and high-quality geospatial information layers. Through the platform, users will be able to visualize, download and analyse multiple decision-oriented coastal risk scenarios relevant to the rich user narratives of our Demonstration Case Studies addressing the three needs raised above. To meet this challenge, CoCliCo brings together European organizations and scholars that have proven track records of delivering broad-scale coastal risk and adaptation assessment, as well as leading research and technologies in interoperable geospatial data management, decision sciences and risk communication.

In an interconnected world, Europe’s economy will be increasingly affected by climate change impacts that occur beyond its border. The movement of goods and services, people and capital occurs at ever increasing rates and volumes. This complex network reveals Europe’s globalized climate exposure, vulnerability and risk structure, through which both gradual and sudden impacts of climatic features at any location on the world (hurricanes, droughts, melting ice sheets) propagate, ultimately impacting Europe’s socio-economic welfare. Public awareness of Europe’s sensitivity to global climate impacts is steadily growing. In order to provide relevant and quantitative information on the European risks from remote global climatic features, RECEIPT will develop and implement a novel stakeholder driven storytelling concept that maps representative connections between European socio-economic activities and remote climatic hazards. Using a limited number of storylines designed for selected sectors, RECEIPT has the following key objectives and deliverables: • Mapping of global hotspots of remote areas with climate features relevant for Europe, using state-of- the-art climate and climate-impact databases; • Science-based sectoral storylines co-developed with societal partners, describing the impacts of remote climate change on: European food security, the financial sector, international development, commodities and European coastal infrastructure; • Assessment of European socio-economic impacts along each of the selected storylines under different future climatic conditions, including high-end climate scenarios; • A robust synthesis of the storyline results into a pan-European socio-economic risk assessment focusing on the difference between high-end and moderate climate change conditions; • Innovative web-based concepts for visualizing potential impacts of remote drivers and mapping risk mitigation options.

Impacts of water scarcity on the environment, society and the economy are complex. They are profoundly shaped by human choices and trade-offs between competing claims to water. Current practices for management of droughts in the UK have largely evolved from experience. Each drought tests institutions and society in distinctive ways. Yet it is questionable whether this empirical and heuristic approach is fit for purpose in the future, because the past is an incomplete guide to future conditions. The MaRIUS project will introduce and explore a risk-based approach to the management of droughts and water scarcity, drawing upon global experiences and insights from other hazards to society and the environment. MaRIUS will demonstrate, in the context of real case studies and future scenarios, how risk metrics can be used to inform management decisions and societal preparedness. Enquiry will take place at a range of different scales, from households and farms to river basins and national scales. Fine-scale granular analysis is essential for understanding drought impacts. Aggregation to broader scales provides evidence to inform critical decisions in water companies, national governments and agencies. Analysis on a range of timescales will demonstrate the interactions between long-term planning and short-term decision making, and the difference this makes to impacts and risks. Underpinning the risk-based approach to management of water scarcity, the MaRIUS project will develop an integrated suite of models of drought processes and impacts of water scarcity. A new 'event set' of past and possible future hydroclimatic drought conditions will enable extensive testing of drought scenarios. The representation of drought processes in hydrological models at catchment and national scales will be enhanced, enabling improved analysis of drought frequency, duration and severity. Models for assessment of the risks of harmful water quality, in rivers and reservoirs, will be developed. The representation of drought impacts in models of species abundance and biodiversity in rivers and wetland ecosystems, such as fens, lowland and upland bogs, will be enhanced. A model of agricultural practices and output will be used to analyse drought impacts on agriculture and investigate the benefits of preparatory steps that may be taken by farmers. The potential economic losses due to water scarcity will be analysed through a combination of 'bottom-up' study of households and businesses, and consideration of supply chain dependence on drought-sensitive industries. The environmental, economic and social dimensions of water scarcity will be synthesised into a computer visualisation tool (an 'impacts dashboard'). This will enable exploratory analysis of feedbacks between impacts. For example, agricultural land use changes, driven in part by drought frequency, will, in turn, influence water quality and ecosystems. The interdisciplinary analysis will enable comparison of likely outcomes arising from applying both pre-existing drought management arrangements (e.g. restrictions on water use, abstraction limits) and enhanced/innovative management strategies (e.g. use of outlook forecasts, dynamic tariffs). Social science and stakeholder engagement are deeply embedded in the MaRIUS project, which will be framed by a critical analysis of how impacts of droughts and water scarcity are currently understood and managed by key stakeholders, and how this is shaped by institutions, regulation and markets. First-hand experience and 'collective memory' of communities affected now, and historically, by water scarcity will provide new understandings of the social and cultural dimensions of droughts. On-going engagement between the project social scientists, natural scientists and stakeholders will help to ensure that the outputs from the MaRIUS project, including the 'impacts dashboard', are matched to their needs and to the evolving policy context.