Towards climate resilience: paving dynamic adaptation pathways for regional climate change hot-spots

Climate change is one of the biggest challenges of recent times, with worldwide economic, societal, and environmental impacts. In response to these challenges, the European Union (EU) proposed the EU Green Deal which sets a blueprint that commits on transforming the EU into the first climate neutral continent by 2050. To this end, innovative solutions for climate-change adaptation and mitigation measures must be implemented in regional and local scales. The H2020 Green Deal project IMPETUS aims to develop and validate a coherent multi-scale, multi-level, cross-sectoral adaptation framework for climate change, paving the way towards a climate-neutral and sustainable future. This will be achieved by building on resilience knowledge and by co-designing together with local communities and stakeholders, innovative packages of methodological, technical, governance and financial solutions. Two such solutions developed within the project are a) the strategic resilience and multi-hazard management tool for identifying dynamic climate adaptation pathways and b) the climate change hot-spot identification and prioritization tool. Through a co-creation approach, stakeholders identify region-specific indicators and metrics of interest that describe climate risk exposure, vulnerability, and adaptation capacity. The hot-spot analysis based on these metrics utilizes collections of spatiotemporal datasets, including future climate scenarios and projections, that describe key parameters from the human and climate dimensions, able to identify hot-spots associated with different climatic and socioeconomic futures. The hot-spot explorer tool is an EU-wide web service and can be used as a screening tool for policymakers to prioritize regions for development of regional adaptations pathways, using the dynamic adaptation pathways tool. A regionally suitable pallet of intervention measures is identified from stakeholder engagement. The pallet is stress-tested for assessing regional climate resilience, under a multitude of different future scenarios, with the objective to generate pathways of progressive implementations of intervention packages that improve the specified indicators and metrics. Some of the intervention options are also operationalized in pilot case studies within the project, such as the employment of sewer mining units in the wastewater system of East Attica for water reuse. The pathways are dynamic and adaptative to changing future conditions, as there are a) key monitored parameters for a region with alarms associated to decision points involving intervention measure implementations, and b) a contingency response module that supports stakeholders to select interventions from different pathways. These tools engage policymakers and stakeholders in order to identify climate change hot-spots within EU, prioritize them, identify suitable intervention measures, and analyze their regions to generate strategic plans for adaptation pathways towards the common climate resilience goal.

Acknowledgement

This work is supported by IMPETUS research project, which received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement  No. 101037084.