HERACLES main objective is to design, validate and promote responsive systems/solutions for effective resilience of CH against climate change effects, considering as a mandatory premise an holistic, multidisciplinary approach through the involvement of different expertise (end-users, industry/SMEs, scientists, conservators/restorators and social experts, decision, and policy makers). This will be operationally pursued with the development of a system exploiting an ICT platform able to collect and integrate multisource information in order to effectively provide complete and updated situational awareness and support decision for innovative measurements improving CH resilience, including new solutions for maintenance and conservation. The HERACLES effectiveness will be ensured by the design and validation of manageable methodologies also for the definition of operational procedures and guidelines for risk mitigation and management. It will be validated in two challenging test beds, key study cases for the climate change impact on European CH assets. The strength of HERACLES solutions is their flexibility in evaluating a big quantity of different information that can be changed and tailored to the specific CH assets needs, guaranteeing in that way a general applicability. In this context, a fundamental role will be played by end-users, which will be active part in the project activities. HERACLES system will be designed and developed by accounting for the economic sustainability and future acceptance by the market and for the social and economic impact for public and local communities while respecting the integrity of CH and the value it hold for communities. Effective technological transfer of HERACLES outcomes to large companies, SMEs and end users, suitable dissemination, communication, education and training activities are also organized to disseminate vision and progresses obtained to different communities, in a vision of wide audiences awareness.

Globally, there is increased concern of the potential impacts of extreme climate events and their impact on loss and damage of people, assets and property as a result of these events. Therefore, natural partners in using climate services to assess risk are the Global Insurance Sector, who are key implementers in increasing societies resilience and recovery of extreme events and who are integral, co-design partners in this programme. This project intends to operationalize a system, called the Oasis Loss Modelling Framework, that combines climate services with damage and loss information and provides a standardised risk assessment process that can assess potential losses, areas at most risk and quantify financial losses of modelled scenarios. We intend to prove the Oasis LMF system through undertaking a range of demonstrators linked and co-designed to ‘real’ situations and end-user communities in the insurance, municipalities and business sectors (see list of partners & collaborators). These demonstrators have already been agreed with our end-users and develop work around hydro-climatic risk (in the Danube Region), Typhoon Risk, African Farmer Risk – through using climate information to support the underwriting of micro-insurance, climate v health and climate v forest asset risk assessment. We also intend to further expand access by all sectors to the models, tools and services developed within this programme and the broader climate services sector by operationalizing an open eMarket place and matchmaking facility for catastrophe and climate data and models, tools and services and through broadening awareness in the climate modelling and end-users communities to the Framework, and the transparent and comparable standard it offers to support evidence based risk assessment and adaptation planning.

The SECIF project consists in the extension of a first preliminary attempt led in partnership with IDDRI (“Institut for sustainable development and international relations) and related to climate change vulnerability issues for companies of industrial and services sectors. This collaboration enabled to identify precise needs into a couple of companies in terms of climate products and climate expertise. Moreover, feasibility of such a partnership has been validated using some concrete studies. They have been performed for two given sectors that are strongly sensitive to the climate adaptation issue: water and energy sectors. Several discussions with other companies and sectors (transport, all sort of services, building, urban planning …) have also shown that awareness of this different actors is actually going. A lot of work is still necessary to make companies more aware and more mature on their vulnerability and to be able to express a clear and concrete demand. In addition to this “consulting” work, research institutes must organise themselves and improve coordination in order to be able, if necessary, to respond to numerous requests and provide suitable information (data, various products and/or analysis methods). Several initiatives concerning model data distribution (regional or global scale data; raw or elaborated data) and their expertise have been launched (Drias and PRODIGUER projects for example). In the other side, several industrial requests on these vulnerability topics are often related to knowledge in the scope of basic research. Answering needs to provide an additional fundamental research and integrate multidisciplinarity aspects. Currently, at a national scale, an interface cell is missing to answer these various requests. The work that we propose in SECIF is then an exploratory step towards the implementation of climate services for industrial community. They will allow to better integrate climate data and knowledge in industrial adaptation strategies.

Climate extremes such as heat waves or tropical storms have huge social and economic impact. The forecasting of such extreme events at the sub-seasonal time scale (from 10 days to 3 months) is challenging. Since the atmosphere and the ocean are coupled systems of enormous complexity, in order to advance sub-seasonal predictability of extreme events, it is crucial to train a new kind of interdisciplinary top-level researchers. CAFE research is structured in three WP: Atmospheric and oceanic processes, Extreme events and Tools for predictability, and brings together an interdisciplinary team of scientists. Objectives: Study of the relation between RWPs and the large scale environment, and the resulting limit of predictability; Statistical characterization of MJO events, dependence on climatic factors, and simple modelling to evaluate predictability; Development of diagnosis tools for identification and tracking of the MJO, blocking, waves and oceanic structures; Analysis of climatic changes in weather patterns and their relation with new climatic phenomena and extreme events in Europe; Estimation of probabilities for severe damages due to extreme events associated to ENSO; Validation of the hypothesis of cascades of extreme events and effects of a non-stationary climate; Estimation of exceedance probabilities for intensity of severe atmospheric events, including windstorms and hurricanes; Assessment of the response of extreme weather events for different levels of stabilized global warming and comparison with their response to internal modes of climate variability; Development of a procedure to improve the predictability of the onset of monsoon; Advanced statistical analysis of dynamic associations between SSS and extreme precipitation events; Study of predictability of large-scale atmospheric flow patterns over the Mediterranean connected to extreme weather; Systematic quantification of the predictability potential of a SWG of analogues of atmospheric circulation.