Even though a wealth of climate datasets has become available over the past decades, challenges remain in the assessment local and regional climate risks.

Many countries in the EU develop ‘National Climate Scenarios’ and related products that can be used for impact and risk assessments and the exploration of adaptation measures. At the same time, within the EU and its associated countries, many regions still rely on globally available climate projections to make a first estimate of regional risk.

Advances are being made in downscaling climate projections, implementation of hazard specific climate impact modelling chains, multi-risk climate assessment and equally relevant the communication of the risk assessment outcomes to sectoral end-users. Yet, common challenges still encountered by the providers and users of scenarios are the communication of uncertainties, requests for very high spatial and temporal resolutions, advice on the use of climate scenarios, interactions with users, integration of climate scenarios with impact information, the value and quality of data for multi-hazard and -risk assessment and how to deal with new scientific insights.

The Horizon Europe project CLIMAAX aimed to address some of the challenges associated with implementing regional climate risk assessments by developing a climate risk assessment framework and toolbox to assess climate risks for a variety of hazards, relying on climate projections from European and global repositories.

For this session we encourage submissions on constructing, delivering, using national climate scenarios and implementing regional climate risk assessments, including:

• Challenges in the provision of National climate information – including information gaps and the challenges in communication and providing information in ways that is relevant and accessible;
• Understanding user needs and the way users use climate scenarios, and the role of co-development of climate information and services;
• Best practices to bridge the gap between large scale climate projections and local relevance for multi-risk assessment (particularly examples that have used the CLIMAAX-developed Handbook and Framework)
• Comparisons of approaches in different countries, and examples of cross-border assessments;
• Future outlook and new opportunities in the science of scenario products drawing from novel types of information or techniques, e.g. Extreme event Attribution, decadal predictions, high resolution models, AI/ML, and new insights in the climate system and/or policy developments