Assessing Climate Change Risk in EUrope

Project Information

ACCREU

Grant agreement ID: 101081358

DOI

10.3030/101081358

EC signature date 3 May 2023

Start date 1 June 2023

End date 30 November 2026

Funded under

• Climate, Energy and Mobility

Total cost

€ 4 992 062,50

EU contribution

€ 4 992 062,50

Coordinated by

FONDAZIONE CENTRO EURO-MEDITERRANEOSUI CAMBIAMENTI CLIMATICI
Italy

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - ACCREU (Assessing Climate Change Risk in EUrope)

Reporting period: 2024-12-01 to 2025-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

ACCREU project provides a comprehensive, integrated, co-created, socio-economic evaluation of future climate risk under different adaptation and mitigation scenarios, across European countries, sectors, households, and business types. During the first reporting period, it has started to deliver key innovative contributions in relation to non-market impacts on biodiversity, ecosystems, and health, and to the interactions between climate change and air quality through the advancements of models and methods for climate risk assessment and integrated adaptation decision-making. Novel empirical investigations have assessed the impacts of extremes on wellbeing and poverty, and models to look at the broader distributional, financial, and fiscal implications of climate impacts and adaptation have been set up.
At societal/economic level, ACCREU is engaging with stakeholders representing different adaptation decision types to co-design practical solutions to successfully mainstream climate resilience and adaptation into decision-making processes.
ACCREU’s case studies have started to examine adaptation decisions in the thematic areas of: financial risk for central banks, ecosystems and nature-based solutions, land use and food systems, water management, protection and management of critical infrastructures including transport and supply chains, health, and human well-being, and justice. To ensure effective uptake and long-term use of its results, the co-designed applied case studies have already involved EU-level stakeholders, such as Directorate-Generals, the JRC, the EEA, the Mission Adaptation, as well as local practitioners, businesses, and authorities.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

-Climate impacts and adaptation literature stocktaking and gap analysis
-Framing of ACCREU’s adaptation and climate scenarios
-Set up of the protocol guiding the project co-creation process with stakeholders
-Implementation of the structured science-practice interaction through continuous bilateral meetings allowing a deep engagement among stakeholders
-Development and improvement of more than ten sectoral and empirical models to assess climate change impacts and adaptation costs for new climate and socioeconomic scenarios and with different levels of adaptation
-Quantification of climate impacts, adaptation costs and benefits in the following areas: infrastructure, built environment, industry, agriculture, water, and forestry, energy, biodiversity, health, wellbeing, poverty
-Initial set-up of five macroeconomic models to assess 1) the financial effects of physical climate change risk on firms and investors’ portfolios, 2) the fiscal effects on public budgets and debt sustainability, the distributional implications for households.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

-Development of an innovative framework and protocol to articulate science-practice interaction throughout the entire project, from the co-identification of the key research priorities to the co-design of communication and dissemination strategies
-Development of a case-study framework to enable a consistent reporting and comparison of fifteen different case studies associated with the ACCREU Adaptation Decision Types, including their economic appraisal and to enable the synthesis of insights from case studies into generic adaptation pathways for each Adaptation Decision Type
-Development of data collection and function extrapolation to allow the integrated analysis of mitigation, adaptation and residual damages into macroeconomic and integrated assessment models
-Development of three adaptation scenarios consistent with the updated AR6 scenarios
-Improvement of climate impact models with a richer characterization of adaptation strategies (e.g. migration in response to coastal and river floods, wetlands, zoning restrictions, dikes strengthening, crop switching and land use adjustment, R&D in agricultural technologies, area abandonment, irrigation, water storage for irrigation, improved access to more advanced technologies, trade, air conditioning, planned power generation outages, subsidies)
-Development of new estimates of climate change impacts under a set of future climate and adaptation scenarios, for multiple hazards (river and coastal floods, sea level rise, wildfire, extreme heat, drought, flood, gradual temperature and precipitation changes) across various impact sectors or endpoints (built environment, infrastructure including energy generation and energy demand, water demand, habitat suitability, species distribution and abundance, crop productivity, livestock, grassland productivity, financial stability of central banks, households wellbeing, labour productivity and supply, mortality and morbidity in physical and monetary units) across countries/regions (EU countries and EU nuts regions), for various timeslices (2030, 2050, ~ 2100) with improved sectoral (e.g. extension of impacts from households to commercial and industrial production sectors) and spatial resolution (e.g. from grid cells to EU subnational regions).