Climate change increases the frequency and severity of extreme weather events, such as storms, heatwaves and droughts. Such events can have devastating societal impacts, and it is becoming increasingly clear that the most impactful disasters are often the result of a complex interplay of multiple physical and societal drivers. Climate attribution, which examines the causal links between extreme events, natural variability, and anthropogenic climate change, can help to unravel this complexity and thereby promote societal preparedness and awareness for climate change impacts. The COMPASS project aims to develop a harmonised, yet flexible, methodological framework for climate and impact attribution of various hazard types. COMPASS will go beyond the current frameworks by bridging the gap from the attribution of single-driver extremes to the attribution of more complex extremes (that is compound, sequences and cascading hazard events) and enabling a shift from a hazard-centred analysis to an impact-centred perspective. Main novelties include event-based hazard and impact modelling using a multi-scale approach, the use of weather type analysis for better understanding the physical drivers that give rise compound extremes, and the use of contextualized storylines to communicate attribution results. The framework will be validated and applied to a set of use cases that cover historical extremes for various hazard types and impact context as well as extreme events happening during the project. COMPASS will lay the scientific foundation for the operational deployment as part of the Copernicus Climate Change Services. The project will create a modular and scalable framework for on-the fly analysis, and thus transferable to other extremes and regions. To promote uptake of the project’s results, data, methods and tools will be made openly available, a web-based demonstrator will showcase the results of the use cases, and clear guideline for attribution will be developed.

ACACIA is an ambitious interdisciplinary alliance to enhance the resilience of at-risk communities in Sub-Saharan Africa to climate impacts. Focusing on floods in the Greater Horn of Africa and floods and tropical cyclones in Madagascar, we seek to improve the ways climate services are produced, disseminated and used for making short-term and long-term decisions to diminish climate risk. Our strategy is to mitigate five obstacles to climate adaptation: 1) Temporal and spatial mismatches and lack of relevance of climate services; 2) Capacity to implement coping strategies and access to climate services; 3) Governance barriers, including fragmentation of responsibility; 4) Climate change, which can make existing coping strategies obsolete; 5) Lack of evidence on the socioeconomic impacts of climate services. Our consortium is highly multidisciplinary. Social science is strongly represented in our cross-cutting co-production activities, which involve working with peer communities consisting of actors from multiple sectors including policymakers, and community work with 100 vulnerable villages in Madagascar. Our rigorous assessment of the added value of climate services-based interventions in these villages will also be led by social scientists. Climate scientists will steer the co-production of national and regional operational early warning systems and work to enhance the skill of a subseasonal forecast model system. All the partners will be involved in an extensive training and capacity-building programme, which targets vulnerable communities, consortium members including national and regional meteorological services. Our consortium has 14 partners, with strong representation from Africa. It involves actors from all parts of the climate services ecosystem. The reason for mobilising such a broad alliance is to ensure that services and protocols are developed locally, which enables our outcomes to be sustained beyond the lifetime of ACACIA.

Significant challenges exist towards strengthening the Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) communities for coherent, mutually reinforcing and pragmatic planning and action. PLACARD seeks to support the coordination of these two communities. PLACARD will tackle current challenges by 1) providing a common ‘space’ where CCA and DRR communities can come together, share experiences and create opportunities for collaboration; 2) facilitating communication and knowledge exchange between both communities; and 3) supporting the coordination and coherence of CCA and DRR research, policy and practice. PLACARD’s approach to achieving these goals is to establish a strong and operational network of networks by connecting to existing networks and boundary organisations, to foster dialogue among stakeholders (e.g. researchers, research funders, policymakers, practitioners) engaged in CCA and DRR at the international, European, national and sub-national scales. This overarching network will enable these communities to share knowledge, to discuss challenges and to jointly co-produce options to bridge the gaps they experience. It will support the development and implementation of a research and innovation agenda to make better use of research funding, as well as to develop guidelines to strengthen relevant institutions in their efforts to mainstream CCA and DRR. PLACARD will evolve iteratively, learning from the different processes and experiences with the stakeholders, and being flexible and responsive to changing needs. PLACARD will be supported by an online platform that builds upon and links existing CCA and DRR platforms to streamline the dissemination and communication of CCA and DRR activities. PLACARD Consortium is built around the leadership of a number of key European institutions experienced in CCA and DRR policy and practice, and UN organizations leading and engaged inpost-2015 agendas.

There is a need for a radical step-up in the attention we pay to current and future climate impacts and associated efforts. Despite inspiring examples of adaptation solutions, stand-alone risk reduction projects that tackle issues through direct or existing policy levers are common practice. Adopting a systemic, transformative approach is advocated by the Mission Adaptation and European Green Deal. P2R takes an innovative systemic approach to regional climate resilience; one indivisible from Europe’s future economic and social development, intersecting with net zero commitments, and demanding a markedly different approach from the one adopted so far. P2R will empower at least 100 regions and communities to co-design visions of a climate resilient future and corresponding transformative, locally led pathways and innovation agendas that ensure long-term impact through political commitment. We do this by: (a) mobilising regional interest and progressively elevating the ambition and capability of regions; (b) developing a Regional Resilience Journey framework (and supporting services) to equip regions and communities in developing climate resilience pathways and connected innovation agendas; (c) allocating €21M across 100 regions and communities via two open call cycles to support their Journeys (d) triggering a wide engagement of citizens and diverse stakeholders in the co-creation of the pathways; (e) increasing knowledge on adaptation innovations across Key Community Systems (KCS) and enabling conditions; (f) boosting literacy and access to (innovative) adaptation finance; and (g) developing a Resilience Maturity Curve to baseline and monitor regional resilience capacities. Led by Climate KIC, the P2R consortium brings the combined strength of: regional network organisations, technical designers and innovators of transformative adaptation, adaptation finance experts, learning and capability building specialists, and monitoring and innovation impact partner.

ENBEL will support EU policy making by bringing together leaders in climate change and health research. We do so by coordinating a network of major international health and climate research projects under the Belmont Forum’s Collaborative Research Action (CRA), Societal Challenge 1 and 5 of EU’s Horizon 2020, and other national and international funding schemes. The network will develop evidence syntheses and co-produce with stakeholders a series of tailor-made knowledge products. The project will engage with EU policy advisors to translate science into policies that help shape low-carbon economies and build climate resilience in member countries while supporting EU diplomacy and development strategies. The overall concept of ENBEL is a bottom-up approach to networking and cooperation across the often separate worlds of climate and health research communities. This can have major impacts on knowledge production and policies. ENBEL brings together a consortium whose work generates actionable knowledge on how climate change-health risks will develop under global warming, what are the social costs and effective, cost-efficient and equitable mitigation and adaptation strategies. ENBEL focuses on three major climate change related health hazards: environmental and occupational heat, air pollution (particularly from wildfires) and climate-sensitive infectious diseases, with specific attention given to high risk groups and populations within Europe, and in Africa/Asia-Pacific region. ENBEL will support a knowledge management platform of EU funded research on climate change and health is two ways: A) build and manage a web-based knowledge platform of health impact of climate change by using innovative tools such as video, photos, maps and infographics; B) connect to existing and recognised knowledge platforms.Through our partners in low-and middle-income countries (LMIC), ENBEL will support, strengthen and establish channels for collaboration and capacity-building in LMIC.