PLACARD is a Horizon 2020 Coordination and Support Action that seeks to support the coordination of Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) and Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) for coherent, mutually reinforcing and pragmatic planning and action. 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.
The European Topic Centre on Climate Change impacts, vulnerability and Adaptation (ETC/CCA) is a centre of thematic expertise contracted by the European Environment Agency (EEA) to carry out specific tasks identified in the EEA strategy and specified in the EEA Annual Management Plans in the area of climate change impacts, vulnerability and adaptation across Europe. The ETC/ACC consortium comprises 10 European institutes led by the Italian Euro-Mediterranean Center for Climate Change (CMCC)and including our research group (CCIAM). Since 1 January 2011, the ETC/CCA assists the EEA in its support to EU policy by improving information including: data and indicators on climate change and its impacts across sectors and regions, assessment of climate change vulnerabilities and natural hazard risks to society and ecosystems and current or planned adaptation strategies and actions.
The FP7 project IMPRESSIONS will focus on five multi-sectoral case studies at global, European and regional/local scales to quantify and explain the consequences of high-end climate scenarios for decision-makers and society. IMPRESSIONS will develop and apply a novel participatory methodology that explicitly deals with uncertainties and strong non-linear changes focusing on high-end climate change, but also including intermediate warming levels.
ClimAdaPT.Local project is aligned with the main aims of the European Strategy for Adaptation to Climate Change and of the National Strategy for Adaptation to Climate Change (ENAAC), and is demonstrating that the European Economic Area Grants (EEA Grants) and the Portuguese Carbon Fund (FPC) are effectively promoting adaptation at local level in Portugal. The specific objectives of this project are: 1) the incorporation of the climate change dimension at local and municipal levels in Portugal; 2) the creation of a community of municipal officers, aware of the issue and trained in the use of tools for decision support in adaptation; 3) the promotion and provision of local knowledge on adaptation to climate change, particularly in developing strategies, planning and implementation of measures and communication of results; 4) the reduction of barriers and constraints to the involvement of local actors in processes of adaptation; and finally, 5) the integration of adaptation policies into planning and decision processes at the municipal level.
The recent expansion of the semiarid climate to all the region of Alentejo and the growing impact of climate change demand a local adaptation. The growth of the native forest represents a strategy at the ecosystem level since it increases resilience and the ecosystem services through the increment of: the organic matter of the soil, carbon and nitrogen, biodiversity, water infiltration, etc; and decreases susceptibility to desertification. For that reason, big areas have been getting reforestated in the Alentejo with the native species holm oak and cork oak but with a low rate of success. The goal of AdaptForChange is to decrease the cost-benefit of reforestations through an innovative approach: - Developing a model that points which areas: i) may be easily and cheaply regenerated; ii) must be subject to assisted reforestation, with the support of different methods; iii) must be occupied by alternative activities because of the difficulty in reforestation. By adequating the efforts and energy to each place through the knowledge of its ecology we can decrease substantially the cost-benefit, improving the rates of long term survival. - Based on the objectives of all the stakeholders, such as to assure the fulfillment of national (ENAAC) and international (Conventions on Biodiversity, Climate Change and Desertification) policies, the accomplishment of the goals of the land owners, the capacitation of local authorities in the best practices of reforestation. The involvement of stakeholders will generate the sensibility and technical capability to assure the continuity of the project’s actions, including the actions of demonstration of soil and water conservation. - With the top science of semiarid ecology – developed by the team –, as well as the knowledge acquired in the past with successive reforestations, whose description, including the rate of success, will be collected for the first time in a geographic database. Based on the knowledge of the neighbors, the best practices observed in the historical semiarid will be transferred to the current semiarid, where in the future we will see the greater impacts of climate change . - Finally, giving to the public all the results of the project in useful formats, namely through workshops to stakeholders, the publishing of a book with best practices and a site and model developed for smartphone apps.
FP7 Env.2012.6.1-3 Total grant: 5.900.000€ FFCUL share: 577.233€ The Bottom-up Climate Adaptation Strategies towards a Sustainable Europe (BASE) project will address the need for research on sustainable climate adaptation strategies, which promote interactions between bottom-up and top-down assessments. The intention is to evaluate the environmental, social and economic impacts, the costs and benefits, policy coherence and stakeholder perceptions of different climate adaptation pathways from an interdisciplinary perspective. The findings from BASE will feed into the European Clearing House Mechanism (CHM) portal and adaptation support tools for policy development.
CIRCLE-2 is a European Network of 34 institutions from 23 countries committed to fund research and share knowledge on climate adaptation and the promotion of long-term cooperation among national and regional climate change programmes.
Coastal areas are considered especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, a fact which requires that both the authorities and the population of these regions have the tools and ability to implement adaptation and mitigation measures that allow them to reduce their vulnerability to the impacts of this phenomenon. In this context, the project "Mitigation and Adaptation to Climate Change in Coastal Zones (ADMICCO)" seeks to reduce the negative impact of climate change among the population of lower quality of life of eight (8) coastal cities of Peru, Chile and Ecuador. ADMICCO is a project implemented by Asociación Civil Labor (Peru) and funded by the European Union, whose execution is done in partnership with CooperAcción (Peru), CEDESUS (Chile), EcoCostas (Ecuador) and Instituto Superior Técnico (IST) / Climate Change Research Group (CC-IAM) in Portugal. The initiative, which will last four years, will focus on capacity building of authorities, officials, technicians, business leaders and civil society as well as the generation, application and transfer of tools to deal adequately to climate change.
Climate change and climate adaptation policy developments represent a set of decision-making frameworks (e.g. international policy commitments, risk management planning and strategic investment decisions) that have to process and incorporate a wide range of uncertainties associated with these scientific outcomes.
In order to account for decision makers’ perspectives and support better informed decisions, this growing - and sometimes controversial - knowledge about the climate system, climate change and associated uncertainties, has to be communicated in a clear and useful way.
This is a great challenge for both researchers and policy-makers working on climate change and climate adaptation policy development and a challenge.This project is a collaboration between our centre and the Instituto Superior the Agronomia (ISA). It will study the relationships between tree growth and climatic factors, in Portugal, using techniques of dendrochronology. This study will contribute to the knowledge about the past climate, for periods preceding the existence of instrumental data, in order to interpret the present context of climate change. Moreover, the study aims to improve understanding of the influence of drought periods on growth of Quercus suber and Q.rotundifolia, two species of the Portuguese forest with large social and economic impacts that grow in environmentally sensitive areas and at risk desertification. Funding: Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT)
The project will research, in 3 areas of the Portuguese coastline jeopardised by erosion, the interaction between: (I) the impact of climate change and other coastal erosion drivers on local populations, (II) the variety of risk concepts and practices through which local agents deal with erosion phenomena. The main objective is to grasp how different interactions between these factors may impact on the sustainability of coastal populations - in order to allow informed policy making and to address the most suitable combinations between prevention and precaution, reactive protection and prospective adaptation.
CIRAC project will study the medium and long-term vulnerabilities of the Portuguese territory to flooding, thus providing information for planning and decision support and reducing the vulnerability of society to these phenomena. The project will produce for continental Portugal, flood areas and flood risk maps in the short, medium and long term, taking into account climate change scenarios, identifying and characterizing the potential impacts / damage to the areas considered most vulnerable.
Current climate change has already had effects on the natural environment, including water resources and much bigger changes are projected for the 21st century (IPCC, 2007; EEA, 2008). In southern Europe, water resources will be very vulnerable to climate change: precipitation is mostly likely to decrease and extreme events (including floods and droughts) will be more frequent. Adaptaclima project will study the medium and long-term vulnerabilities of the EPAL (Empresa Portuguesa das Águas Livres) system to climate change, thus providing information for planning and decision support and reducing its vulnerability. The project will allow EPAL to strategically plan adaptation as a response to climate change.
In line with the National Climate Change Adaptation Strategy, CCIAM is working with the National Biodiversity Institute (ICNB) to create a sectoral adaptation strategy for biodiversity. This project will collect available information on Impacts and Vulnerability of Biodiversity to Climate Change and work with experts and stakeholders to define adaptation objectives and specific measures.
FENIX is a 3-year European LIFE+ project which will create a user-friendly and flexible tool for assisting municipalities, communities and regions of Spain and Portugal to easily obtaining environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) results on packaging waste management. The tool will also take into account economic and social aspects through the entire life cycle of this type of waste, and will be flexible enough to be adaptable to different European realities. The software tool will be specially designed to assist local and regional waste managers of those countries to look for more eco-efficient and sustainable solutions for packaging waste management, but also will be extrapolable to other European regions.
The main goal of this project is to build a conceptual model for an intelligent Visual Analysis tool for large 4-Dimensional fields (VA-4D). The visual analysis tool will be a decision support system targeting different users and contexts, with five demonstration scenarios acting as source of requirements, conceptual abstractions, and also as demonstrators. The tool will support, in a user-friendly visual way, the exploration of complex (including uncertainty in data) and/or large data sets in different formats from standard 2D (slices), 3D (volume rendering) and even 4D (volume analysis along time) to geometrically transformed displays, dense pixel displays, etc. We have implicitly included different levels of stakeholders at the various stages of the project.
Stands for Full-chain and UNcertainty Approaches for Assessing Health Risks in FUture ENvironmental Scenarios" and aims to provide decision-makers with state of the art tools to analyse the current and future trends in environmental conditions and pressures that may lead to health problems.
CIRCE aims at developing for the first time an assessment of the climate change impacts in the Mediterranean area.
The objectives of the project are:
- to predict and to quantify physical impacts of climate change in the Mediterranean area;The objective of this project is to study climate change impacts and adaptation measures on specific sectors, namely, water resources, coastal zones, human health, energy, tourism, forests, biodiversity and agriculture in the Cascais Municipality. The impact assessment will allow to strategically plan adaptation as a response to climate change in Cascais.
Climate impact analysis and adaptation response must be informed by a coherent body of research and it is CIRCLE´s prime objective to contribute to such efforts by networking and aligning national research programmes in the 19 CIRCLE partner countries. The Implementation of a European Research Area (ERA) for climate change is CIRCLE’s final goal.
Assessment of past and current population health vulnerability to: · Periods of extreme thermal stress · Periods with high air pollution levels associated with extreme temperatures and also to forest fires · Indirect impacts of drought periods. Assessment of the possible increases of mortalities and when possible morbidities associated with future episodes of extreme weather in Portugal, in particular those associated with heatwaves. Towards the end of the project, a conference (workshop) will be organized in which the project results will be communicated to the Portuguese scientific community and the media.
Portuguese Forum Post-Kyoto aims to be an information center and space for discussion of the Portuguese civil society on the future regime to combat climate change
The objective of this project is to study climate change impacts and adaptation measures on specific sectors, namely, water resources, coastal zones, human health, energy, tourism, forests and biodiversity in the Sintra area.
This project addressed the effects of climatic changes on air and water thermal comfort and its implications on tourist demand factors, tourists (and local) population health and energy supply demands. This strategic assessment focused on Portugal’s four main tourist destinations: Algarve, Lisboa, Porto and Madeira Island. Ambient air thermal comfort levels and coastal water thermal comfort levels were calculated. The impact of thermal extremes on human health were assessed using standard epidemiological methods. Potential changes in energy demands that are required to maintain comfortable indoor thermal levels in tourist related facilities and equipments, such as hotels, swimming pools, and tour buses, were also assessed. Climate data used in the impact studies were based on observed data and climate change scenarios 50 years into the future.
This project characterized the Portuguese coastal climate variability during the XX Century, with special emphasis on the physical effects on the ocean environment that are most relevant for the climate change vulnerability of biological communities. These include changes in sea surface temperature, wind stress, upwelling, wave climate, storminess, salinity, stratification and circulation patterns. The scenarios of climate change for the Portuguese coast were obtained from downscaling of GCMs. Projected shifts in the geographic distribution of marine biota and changes in biodiversity were studied for dinoflagellate cysts, coastal fish assemblages and migratory birds. First order damage or beneficial effects on fish harvest levels from climate change and its implications on the Portuguese industry were assessed.
The Climate change in Portugal, scenarios, impacts and adaptation measures (SIAM) is dedicated to study of the risks associated to the climate change in Portugal.
The objective of this Project was to make an integrated and multi-sectorial assessment of the impacts and adaptation measures to climate change in the Madeira Islands until 2100 based of future scenarios obtained from downscaling of General Circulation Models (GCM). Project CLIMAAT II assessed the impacts and adaptation measures in the Madeira archipelago on the following sectors: Water Resources, Forests, Agriculture, Biodiversity, Human Health, Tourism and Energy. The assessment was based on the characterization of the recent climate of the Madeira Islands, including it’s oceanic component, and on future climate scenarios obtained from GCMs, through downscaling techniques developed in the SIAM Project.