Climate change monitoring and atmospheric indices in Basque Country: experiences from URBANKLIMA2050 LIFE project.

UrbanKlima2050 is the most ambitious initiative led by the Basque Country which aims at ensuring the resilience of the territory from a multi-level governance, multi-stakeholder, and on-the-ground climate action approach. This largescale Life Integrated Project was launched at the end of 2019 thanks to a partnership of 20 organisations and an investment of EUR19,8 million. The project partners have set an ambitious target of delivering different actions during 6 years, impacting over 2 million people. The main aim of UrbanKlima2050 project is to contribute to the full implementation of the Basque Climate Change Strategy 2050, developing a low-carbon and climate change resilient region by 2050.

Project actions are grouped in five major blocks: (1) Analyse: to review the Basque KLIMA 2050 strategy through follow-ups and evaluations, with a continuous improvement approach; (2) Define: how, where and when to act to reduce GHG emissions, increase absorption, and achieve territorial resilience; (3) Act: to launch pilot projects at three levels of intervention: coast, river basins and urban/peri-urban areas, scalable to other areas of the Basque Country and to other regions; (4) Empower: to promote climate awareness among the governmental institutions and the community and move them to action; (5) Manage: to create structures to facilitate climate governance and climate change observation and monitoring and define new models for climate governance and launch the Hub for observing and monitoring of climate change in the Basque Country.

Tecnalia is participating on twelve actions, leading five. Here we focus on those aspects related to the Climate change hub action, led by IHOBE, where different activities are developed by Tecnalia, AZTI, Neiker, and other institutional agents in order to establishing a Hub for observation and monitoring climate change at Basque Country level. Particularly, the weather and climate area of Tecnalia works in different task in the atmospheric domain.

Among other topics we cover the identification of the main sources of instrumental information available in relation to the atmospheric characterisation of the territory, including both those for which longer historical records are available and those of a more novel nature that may be useful in the future in an operational perspective. We also design and implement strategies for signals of change and trends detection of the most representative indices and indicators at different level of spatial and temporal aggregation.

In this paper, we share our experience in the development of this action, summarising the key aspects and providing some conclusions in relation to the definition and implementation of the monitoring system for atmospheric-based indicators for the Basque Country. This system will be an essential part of the Basque HUB on climate change to be developed in UrbanKlima2050 project that will end in 2025.