Recent literature has underlined the interplay among climate mitigation, adaptation, and finance, as well as between climate action and other development agendas, including sustainable resource use, human development and equity, and environmental pressures. Such an interconnected policy environment requires an integrated ecosystem of disciplines, methods, and tools. Despite the significant evolution of integrated assessment models (IAMs) in the last decade, there remain several criticisms on their design, use, and adequacy to respond to unaddressed and emerging questions in the light of the Paris Agreement and net-zero ambition. These include openness, legitimacy, and ownership, as well as technical feasibility to represent demand-side and broader societal transformations, cross-sectoral interactions, physical impacts and adaptation, climate finance and labour dynamics, and other sustainability goals. DIAMOND will update, upgrade, and fully open six IAMs that are emblematic in scientific and policy processes, improving their sectoral and technological detail, spatiotemporal resolution, and geographic granularity. It will further enhance modelling capacity to assess the feasibility and desirability of Paris-compliant mitigation pathways, their interplay with adaptation, circular economy, and other SDGs, their distributional and equity effects, and their resilience to extremes, as well as robust risk management and investment strategies. This will be done via integration of tools and insights from psychology, finance research, behavioural and labour economics, operational research, and physical science. We will develop a transdisciplinary scientific approach to legitimise the implementation process and co-create research questions that stretch the frontiers of climate science, as well as establish vibrant communities of practice to transparently open model enhancements and to develop capacities, thereby lowering the entrance barriers to the established IAM community.

Large scale deployment of renewable energy (RE) is key to comply with the GHG emissions reduction set by the COP21 agreement. Despite cost competitive in many settings, RE diffusion remains limited largely due to its variability. This works as a major barrier to RE’s integration in electricity networks as knowledge of power output and demand forecasting beyond a few days remains poor. To help solve this problem, S2S4E will offer an innovative service to improve RE variability management by developing new research methods exploring the frontiers of weather conditions for future weeks and months. The main output of S2S4E will be a user co-designed Decision Support Tool (DST) that for the first time integrates sub-seasonal to seasonal (S2S) climate predictions with RE production and electricity demand. To support the dissemination of climate services, a pilot of the DST will be developed in two steps. The first will draw on historical case studies pointed as relevant by energy companies - e.g. periods with an unusual climate behaviour affecting the energy market. The second step will improve probabilistic S2S real-time forecasts built up into the DST and assess their performances in real life decision-making in these companies. This process will be co-designed with consortium’s partners which represent different needs and interests in terms of regions, RE sources (wind, solar and hydro) and electricity demand. Besides the partners, S2S4E will engage other users from the energy sector as well as other business areas and research communities to further explore DST application and impact. As a result, DST will enable RE producers and providers, electricity network managers and policy makers to design better informed S2S strategies able to improve RE integration, business profitability, electricity system management, and GHG emissions’ reduction. The long-term objective is to make the European energy sector more resilient to climate variability and extreme events.

PLANET4Health provides new knowledge and tools on environment degradation and its impact on human animal and ecosystems health. The project results will support policy making process and citizens awareness on sustainable planetary health, climate and environmental policies and adaptation and mitigation strategies to natural hazards. PLANET4health will develop collaborations from a large variety of organizations from the: environmental and climate science, public health, epidemiology, veterinary medicine, social, political and economic science, engineering, law and ethics, and communication, to produce solid knowledge and tools to facilitate learning and practice on the interaction between the natural system and human health. Four tailor-made case studies will be performed: 1) One Health effects of vector-borne diseases, 2) air pollution, 3) food contamination arising from soil and water contamination, 4) mental wellbeing linked to environmental and climate stressors, in different geographical area thanks to the large project network, that will draw universal conclusions and replicable solutions to improve the predictive capability and preparedness. The consortium will produce research, technological innovation, tailored outreach and training, and policy solutions through a cross-sectorial multidisciplinary scientific collaboration in line with the transnational character of planetary health. For these aims the project will: a) collect, organize and assure open availability of new and already existing data on climate and environmental indicators linked to One Health; b) carry out analyses on data and build innovative, inter-operable and multifunctional digital prototypes; c) produce new knowledge and tools to support One Health policies by applying social science theories and involving citizens, policymakers and stakeholders; d) offer open-access data, tools and research material to public authorities for decision making and academic research for further study.