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.

Extreme wildfire events (EWE) are becoming a major environmental, economic and social threat in Southern Europe and increasingly gaining importance elsewhere in Europe. As the limits of fire suppression-centered strategies become evident, practitioners, researchers and policymakers increasingly recognise the need to develop novel approaches that shift emphasis to the root causes and impacts of EWE, moving towards preventive landscape and community management for greater resilience. FIRE-RES integrates existing research, technology, civil protection, policy and governance spheres related to wildfires to innovate processes, methods and tools to effectively promote the implementation of a more holistic fire management approach and support the transition towards more resilient landscapes and communities to EWE. To achieve this, FIRE-RES will, first, generate new knowledge on sustainable integrated fire management models that help to define what type of possible future scenarios (including climate change and general policies) should be promoted across EU territories. Second, it will identify and demonstrate innovations at the technological, social, health/safety, administrative, ecological and economic levels to define how and across which possible paths the future scenarios may be achieved in the EU. These innovations will be implemented in different regional contexts, and upscaled at the national and EU levels using an open innovation hub, promoting capacity building and partnership brokerage between public and private actors. Third, it will raise societal awareness and engagement on wildfire risk prevention, preparedness and response by leveraging existing national and cross-border networks at supranational levels. FIRE-RES is a transdisciplinary, multi-actor consortium, formed by researchers, wildfire agencies, technological companies, industry and civil society from 13 countries, linking to broader networks in science and disaster reduction management.

TEMA will greatly improve Natural Disaster Management (NDM, e.g., for wildfires, floods) by automating precise semantic 3D mapping and disaster evolution prediction to achieve NDM goals in near-real-time. It will analyze and fuse many heterogeneous extreme data sources: smart drone and in-situ sensors, remote sensing data, topographical data, meteorological data/predictions and geosocial media data (text, image and videos). TEMA will focus on the extreme nature of the data, due to their varying resolution and quality, very large volume and update rate, different spatiotemporal resolutions and acquisition frequencies, real-time needs and multilingualism. It will develop an integrated, ground-breaking NDM platform, focusing on real-time semantic extraction from multiple heterogeneous data modalities and sources, on-the-fly construction of a meaningful semantically annotated 3D disaster area map, prediction of disaster evolution and improved communication between service providers and end-users, through automated process triggering and response recommendations. Semantic analysis computations will be distributed across the edge-to-cloud continuum, in a federated manner, to minimize latency. Extreme data analytics will be performed in a trustworthy and transparent way, by greatly advancing state-of-the-art AI and XAI approaches. The constantly updated 3D map and the disaster evolution predictions will form the basis for an advanced, interactive, Extended Reality (XR) interface, where the current situation will be visualized and different response strategies will be dynamically evaluated through simulation by NDM personnel. The innovative, scalable and efficient TEMA platform will provide precise NDM support, based on extreme data analytics. It will be validated on two critical disaster use-cases (wildfires and floods), in four EU countries, and will form the basis for the TEMA NDM-Analytics-as-a Service (NDM-AaaS) model.

2018 was a glimpse of the future: deadly mega-fires in Mediterranean and numerous wildfires in temperate and boreal regions. Traditional mono-disciplinary attitudes cannot solve this challenge: there is a critical need to change management paradigms from fire resistance to landscape resilience: Living with Fire. PyroLife trains the new generation of interdisciplinary experts in holistic integrated fire management, through knowledge transfer between South and NW Europe and application of lessons learned in prevention of floods and other risks. Our unique integrated training program, crucially developed with industry, provides 15 ESRs the in-depth, interdisciplinary, integrated and transferable knowledge and skills required to complete their research and maximize future employability. Individual projects target risk quantification (fire danger, vulnerability, (mega)fire behavior, environmental and economic impacts), risk reduction (fire resilient home, garden and landscape design, prevention and governance), and risk communication (stimulating stakeholder and community resilience and preparedness). PyroLife is original for its inter- and transdisciplinary, intersectoral, cross-risk, and cross-climate approach to training doctoral students and tackling wildfire challenges, connecting 21 diverse partners. The project structures doctoral training by being the first large and integrated doctoral training program on wildfires globally, being a leading example for training of our future leaders. With an exemplary gender balance and diversity in industry and academia, PyroLife combines excellent research and supervision to make an impact on society and economy, through broad dissemination and communication. With the Commission’s Nov 2018 call for integrated fire management to ‘tackle the global EU wildfire problem’, the timeliness of PyroLife cannot be overstated. Funding of PyroLife provides the diverse fire experts Europe urgently needs in academia and practice.

Technological advances in high performance computing are creating exciting new opportunities that move well beyond improving the precision of simulation models. The use of extreme computing in real-time applications with high velocity data and live analytics is within reach. The availability of fast growing social and sensor networks raise new possibilities in monitoring, assessing and predicting environmental, social and economic incidents as they happen. Add in grand challenges in data fusion, analysis and visualization, and extreme computing hardware has an increasingly essential role in enabling efficient processing workflows for huge heterogeneous data streams. VESTEC will create the software solutions needed to realise this vision for urgent decision making in various fields with high impact for the European community. VESTEC will build a flexible toolchain to combine multiple data sources, efficiently extract essential features, enable flexible scheduling and interactive supercomputing, and realise 3D visualization environments for interactive explorations by stakeholders and decision makers. VESTEC will develop and evaluate methods and interfaces to integrate high-performance data analytics processes into running simulations and real-time data environments. Interactive ensemble management will launch new simulations for new data, building up statistically more and more accurate pictures of emerging, time-critical phenomena. Innovative data compression approaches, based on topological feature extraction and data sampling, will result in considerable reductions in storage and processing demands by discarding domain-irrelevant data. Three emerging use cases will demonstrate the immense benefit for urgent decision making: wildfire monitoring and forecasting; analysis of risk associated with mosquito-borne diseases; and the effects of space weather on technical supply chains. VESTEC brings together experts in each domain to address the challenges holistically.