Supporting regions and local authorities in assessing climate risks

Expected Outcome:

In support of the European Green Deal, the EU Adaptation Strategy, the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change and the EU Disaster Resilience Goals, the successful proposal will accelerate adaptation efforts of regional and local authorities. The project is expected to contribute to all of the following outcomes:

• The regional multi-risk assessment framework and the supporting toolbox already developed in the context of the Mission are further improved and their use is mainstreamed. As a result, scientific knowledge on climate risk assessments at the regional and local levels is strengthened.
• Regions and local authorities have conducted a comprehensive climate risk assessment and are therefore better equipped to reduce their vulnerability and exposure to climate change and to improve their climate resilience.
• Closer links between climate adaptation and disaster risk management policy actors, communities, scientists and civil society are established.
• Current and future climate risks are communicated more clearly to non-specialist audiences, boosting the buy-in and support for a wide range of actions for climate resilience at the regional and local levels and fighting climate disinformation.

Scope:

The first European Climate Risk Assessment (EUCRA) concluded that Europe is not prepared for rapidly growing climate risks. Assessing climate risks is one the first steps that regional and local authorities need to undertake in the adaptation planning^[1]. This step is key to provide robust adaptation plans that respond to the needs of the regional and local authorities.

From the survey conducted by the Mission with its Charter signatories, it emerged clearly that only 66% of the regional and local authorities had already assessed their climate risks and, in some cases, their climate risk assessments require update and further work to increase their robustness. Using these results as proxy for all regional and local authorities, there is an evident need for more robust regional and local climate risk assessments in Europe.

With its call HORIZON-MISS-2021-CLIMA-02-01, the Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change mandated the development of a methodological framework and toolbox for climate risk assessments at the regional and local levels and to provide direct support to regional and local authorities to use those tools. This topic aims to build upon the achievements of the project CLIMAAX, funded HORIZON-MISS-2021-CLIMA-02-01 :

1)by consolidating and further mainstreaming its regional climate risk assessment framework and supporting toolbox (1st objective thereafter)

2) by supporting additional regional and local authorities (not supported by CLIMAAX) to conduct regional climate risk assessments and to develop or revise community-based emergency and risk management plans (2^nd objective thereafter).

Both objectives detailed below should be addressed by the proposals. By doing so, this topic directly contributes to the follow-up of the Commission Communication on managing climate risks, where, in its response to EUCRA, the European Commission committed to improving tools that support regions and local authorities better prepare for climate risks.

1st objective- Consolidating and further mainstreaming the framework and toolbox for climate risk assessments.

Further developments of the framework and toolbox for regional climate risk assessment should keep their initial requirements, namely:

• The improved toolbox and framework should be for multi-risk and multi-sector and include exposure and vulnerability.
• The improved toolbox should be broadly applicable in EU Member States (including Outermost Regions) and Associated Countries of Horizon Europe.
• The improved toolbox and related IT tools should be made open source, free and open licensed.

Further refinements of the methodological framework and supporting toolbox should aim to address emerging knowledge and data gaps and could reflect but are not limited to the following elements:

• Incorporating tailored ‘responses’ as a key part of the risk framework, as introduced in the sixth assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change;
• Considering, cascading and compounding risks and/or risks from other crises such as biodiversity loss and pollution;
• Accounting for the dynamic nature of climate risk that changes with time;
• Exploring how to translate future scenarios, designed at the global scale, into local risks;
• Incorporating supporting tools for regional climate risk management planning to effectively use the results of the climate risk assessments as basis for community-based emergency and risk management plans.
• Exploring ways to integrate the developments for multi-risk by previous and ongoing Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects^[2]

Those refinements to the framework and supporting toolbox should be co-designed and co-produced with regional/local authorities and practitioners from several EU Member States/Associated Countries, to ensure that their needs and constraints are addressed in a practical way. The improved framework and associated toolbox should benefit from a built-in mechanism for continuous feedback and iterative improvements, ensuring that the tools and assessments remain relevant as climate science and policy evolve.

The consolidated version of the toolbox should strive to include newly produced datasets, in particular those coming from other EU programmes and initiatives such as Copernicus and Destination Earth or from EURO-CORDEX. Exploiting digital technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) in the tool to better quantify and assess climate risks is encouraged. Proposals are also encouraged to consider -- where relevant -- the services offered by European research infrastructures^[3] as well as related projects such as IRISCC.

An effective, timely and targeted communication of climate risks is key to drive climate action. The proposals should dedicate efforts to make the improved toolbox and its results more accessible and understandable by non-experts and to combat climate disinformation. This toolbox should include a simple Graphical User Interface to facilitate the dissemination of risk information across the European Union and Associated countries. These efforts to increase accessibility should occur in parallel to the developments of the toolbox for more advanced/expert users.

2nd objective- Using the improved framework and toolbox to support regional and local authorities in assessing their climate risks, as a basis for development or revision of local adaptation, risk management, disaster prevention plans (cascade funding).

The proposals must provide financial support to third parties in the form of grants to allow at least 50 regional and local authorities to conduct a comprehensive climate risk assessment.

The grants for third parties should be used for conducting comprehensive climate risk assessments or refining existing ones, using the framework and toolbox developed under the 1^st objective of this topic.

Eligible third parties are regional and local authorities in EU Member States and Horizon Europe Associated Countries (and/or other entities acting on their behalf), provided that they did not receive financial support under the CLIMAAX^[4] project nor the concerned territories were already covered by CLIMAAX.

At least 60% of the total amount of the EU requested contribution should be for financial support to third parties. Preferably, the (first) cascade call should be launched in the first 12 months of the project.

Proposals must describe how they intend to provide financial support to third parties, in accordance with the FSTP Annex provided with the application form. They should also specifically take account of provisions on ‘financial support to third parties’ set out in General Annex B and incorporate them into the proposal. While remaining as simple as possible, proposals should specifically consider elements within the FSTP scheme to address geographical balance and inclusivity/equity.

To this purpose, learning from the experience of projects with financial support to third parties/cascading funding could be considered: on top of consulting publicly available information on lessons learnt, the project retained for granting is expected to hold dedicated exchanges with the projects CLIMAAX, Pathways2Resilience and the Mission Secretariat during the preparation of the cascade funding call.

Moreover, the project should collaborate with the Mission National Hubs^[5] also in view of facilitating good practice sharing and replicability at National level.

General considerations

During its duration, the project should include an open support line or helpdesk to assist European regional and local authorities that are not financially supported by the project (2^nd objective) but are nevertheless interested in using the toolbox to assess their climate risks.

The project is expected to identify and support ways by which the framework and toolbox may be applied more widely, including by the disaster risk management community (e.g. emergency responders, national civil protection agencies, disaster risk planners, Union Civil Protection Knowledge Network). To this end, the awarded project should collaborate with the Mission National Adaptation Hubs^[6] to share best practices from regional and local authorities receiving the third-party grants and foster replicability at the national level. These could entail co-design, co-production, stakeholder involvement or similar activities so that the results of the project are beneficial for the mentioned policymakers or operational/rescue bodies.

The proposals should explore ways to harvest the data generated as part of the project to increase the resolution and quality of European-wide climate risk datasets, assessments and responses. The assessments conducted under the project should be made available for any future reference and use through the Joint Research Centre’s Risk Data Hub^[7], the recognized Hub of climate risk knowledge as indicated by the EU Adaptation Strategy.

As an important contributor to the Adaptation Mission, the project awarded should cooperate with the Mission Implementation Platform^[8], including (but not limited to) actively inform and engage with the regions and local authorities already involved in the Mission (e.g. Charter Signatories, Community of Practice), as those have shown their commitment to accelerate action on climate resilience. The project is also expected to contribute to the monitoring of the Mission and proposals are encouraged to link up their monitoring to the framework developed by the project stemming from HORIZON-MISS-2024-CLIMA-01-03 and dedicate appropriate resources to this task.

Finally, operational links and collaboration should be established with the Climate-ADAPT platform; the relevant projects from the Mission^[9]; or other parts of Horizon Europe such as clusters 3 and 5 or other relevant EU programmes such as LIFE or the Technical Support Instrument.

Applicants should acknowledge these requests and already account for them in their proposal, making adequate provisions in terms of resources and budget to engage and collaborate with the Mission.

[1] See step 2 ‘Step 2 Assessing climate risks and vulnerabilities’ of the regional adaptation support tool

[2] This includes but is not limited to MYRIAD-EU projects funded under the topics HORIZON-MISS-2021-CLIMA-02-03 , HORIZON-CL3-2021-DRS-01-02, HORIZON-CL5-2022-D1-01-02-two-stage and HORIZON-CL3-2021-DRS-01-03, GOBEYOND, ANYWHERE, C2IMPRESS

[3] The catalogue of European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) research infrastructures portfolio can be browsed from ESFRI website https://ri-portfolio.esfri.eu/

[4] This information is or will be publicly available on the website of CLIMAAX. For instance, here are the beneficiaries of the first call: https://www.climaax.eu/first-regions-started-climate-risk-assessment/

[5] Established under topic HORIZON-MISS-2024-CLIMA-01-02

[6] Established by the project funded under topic HORIZON-MISS-2024-CLIMA-01-02

[7] https://drmkc.jrc.ec.europa.eu/risk-data-hub#/

[8] Currently managed by MIP4Adapt under the contract CINEA/2022/OP/0013/SI2.884597 funded by the European Union. About MIP4Adapt (europa.eu)

[9] e.g. the projects from topics HORIZON-MISS-2021-CLIMA-02-03, HORIZON-MISS-2025-01-CLIMA-02