From fragmented climate knowledge to decision-relevant information: the approach CSRCC (International Centre for Climate Change Research and Studies) for the Venice Lagoon

Decision-making in coastal and urban environments increasingly depends on the ability to navigate complex and interacting climate risks. Yet, relevant knowledge is often scattered across disciplines, institutions, data repositories, and policy documents, making it difficult to access and use in practice. The amphibious city of Venice (Italy) is an exemplary case: its unique environmental setting, long history of climate exposure, and dense legacy of scientific research and monitoring coexist with highly complex governance and decision-making processes.

Here we present the International Centre for Climate Change Research and Studies (CSRCC) and its recently launched activities, highlighting the advanced applications being developed to foster the systematization of interdisciplinary knowledge.

The CSRCC brings together several interconnected activities with the aim of serving as a bridge between science and decision‑making in the Venetian context. These include the development of an advanced meta-database, designed to organize and explore not only climate and environmental data, but also research outputs, monitoring programmes, regulations, plans, and policy documents relevant to climate mitigation, adaptation, and resilience. These multi-disciplinary connections/relations enable us to build artificial intelligence applications to improve queries, allowing users to extract inter-connected knowledge which is critical to understand and support decision-making in complex environments.In parallel, the CSRCC is preparing an IPCC-like local Climate Assessment Report, aimed at synthesizing existing knowledge in a transparent and decision-relevant way. Ongoing activities also include research on long-term sea-level rise and lagoon evolution, providing historical and geological context for current and future risks, as well as the integration of the Centre’s work within broader European research and coordination initiatives.

Using Venice as a testbed, we discuss how assessment-oriented and metadata-driven approaches can help translate fragmented climate knowledge into usable information for successful mitigation and adaptation strategies, and how this experience may inform similar efforts in other coastal and urban settings.