Integrated Climate Adaptation Service Tools for Improving Resilience Measure Efficiency

The EU-funded CLARITY (www.clarity-h2020.eu) project set out to help city planners, road planners and policymakers’ efforts to easily identify and mitigate climate change risks. The project worked to create a digital tool and online platforms to bring the latest scientific knowledge in a tailored way to end-users in cities and regions. The tool can help in taking the informed decisions to ensure that the urban and traffic infrastructure they are responsible for is more climate resilient.

Four demonstration cases in Italy, Sweden, Austria and Spain were used to show the potential of CLARITY climate services in relation to different hazards and urban infrastructure project type.

CLARITY Project team has developed a generic methodology that is appropriate for both expert and screening studies and aligned with the IPCC-AR5 approach. CLARITY methodology consequently applies the risk-based approach to determine climate change impacts, by adopting the well know relation R = H x E x V, where Hazard (H), Exposure (E), and Vulnerability (V) represent the key aleatory variables.
A set of simple ad-hoc “screening” models was developed for use in the screening services. These models are based on open data (e.g. Copernicus, Eurostat), automatically calculated on demand for the project area, and provide relevant data at ~500m resolution for a large number of European metropolitan areas. Following CLARITY “screening” models were developed:

- Hazards: simple microclimate models for Heat Wave and pluvial flooding hazards.
- Exposure: population, several types of traffic infrastructure, buildings, and open areas
- Vulnerability / impact: indicators relating hazards to exposure, such as “excess heat mortality” and “flood damage to buildings”

These models rely on CLARITY algorithms for extracting detailed information from various openly available data sources. These parameters include key parameters related to the urban morphology (terrain, vegetation, building density, etc.) land use (residential, industry, transport network, open spaces, etc.) and surface type (e.g. albedo, emissivity, green fraction, runoff coefficient, etc.).

Finally, a set of adaptation options and adaptation strategies was defined, and the ad-hoc models estimating their effects on local hazard distribution and mitigation of climate change impacts were also implemented. Detailed information on these developments is available in D2.4. “CLARITY Demonstrators Implementation and Validation Report v2” and D3.3 “Science support report v2”.

In addition, the project has developed an online marketplace that facilitates matching the regional offers and demand for climate adaptation know-how, products and services (https://marketplace.myclimateservices.eu/ , D5.7 “MyClimateService.eu Marketplace”) and a set of webinars, video-tutorials and video features explaining various project developments and results in a simple way (https://www.gotostage.com/channel/climate-adaptation D6.7 “CLARITY Guideline v2”)

Typical CLARITY user workflow from the initial Screening to Expert Services and Marketplace, is designed to facilitate the identification, uptake and integration of adaptation measures within urban infrastructure projects, limiting the burden of data collection activities and simulations from the user side, going beyond generic urban adaptation guidelines, and providing a solution tailored to the specific settlement and project context.

The potential of identifying the expected impact on urban infrastructure of short-, to mid- to long-term climate change scenarios including the effects of urban microclimate variability represents a major innovation in the field of urban Climate Change Adaptation modelling. Extensive studies and IT developments have been conducted to adapt the models available in literature with the major public data sources at EU level, exploiting the most recent systematization efforts conducted in this sense by various EC Agencies, including Copernicus, Eurostat and the JRC-DRMKC. Hazard data from future climate models, with a typical resolution of 10-12 km in Europe (Euro-CORDEX) are refined by generate a local hazard layers mesh with a resolution of 500-500 m overlapped on the European urban areas covered by GEOSS and/or statistical information.

CLARITY expert studies were recognised valuable inputs for strategic climate mitigation planning and contributed to development of such plans in the four DC regions.
A set of 21 hazard indices for the whole Europe (~12 km resolution) that was developed as one of the inputs to CLARITY expert and screening services is available as Open Data on https://zenodo.org/communities/clarity

CLARITY Climate Services Information System (https://csis.myclimateservice.eu/) prototype supports end-users in getting an overview of the climate-change related risks and relevant adaptation options for their projects at a ~500m resolution in over 450 European metropolitan areas. The results of this screening can be saved as PDF or printed and used as a part of the project documentation. To the best of our knowledge, no similar service exists in Europe and even worldwide (status February 2021).

The CLARITY Marketplace (https://myclimateservices.eu/en/h2020/clarity-marketplace) informs the users about the relevant “Expert services” they could/should consult for detailed planning and implementation of the adaptation options that are relevant to their project. Such expert services can be either online or offline and can be offered either by CLARITY experts or by the third parties. In this way, the CLARITY service users can minimize the cost and efforts required to perform an adequate adaptation planning, while also maximizing the visibility of the relevant expert offers and streamlining the communication.

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - CLARITY (Integrated Climate Adaptation Service Tools for Improving Resilience Measure Efficiency)

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