Exploring WEMC’s role in the CROSSEU Project
January 2024 marked WEMC embarking on a new collaboration as a partner in CROSSEU, an EU-funded project responding to the increasing societal need to reduce climate-damaging activity. The project unites 15 partner organisations – Meteo Romania, UEA, WMO, TESAF, UCL, K&I, Hereon, LGI, EDF, BOKU, DTU, WEMC, UKRI, RCSES, CZU – who have the shared objective of creating a climate-sensitive framework with data and modelling relevant to a range of sectors that will help guide investment decisions, adaptation and mitigation strategies, and policy responses to climate change in Europe.
The project will focus on eight case studies spanning a wide spectrum of climate and socio-economic contexts within Europe, investigating key categories of climate hazards such as storms, heatwaves, droughts, and snow. WEMC will lead Case Study 7 evaluating climate impacts on Energy together with project partner EDF; the case study objective is to assess the impact of climate hazards on Europe’s energy systems with high renewable shares, focusing on operational costs, security adaptations, and policy responses.
The three-year CROSSEU project seeks to deepen the understanding of the socioeconomic risks and responses associated with climate change impacts. By integrating complex information from both climate-related and socio-economic sectoral data, the project aims to develop tools to provide practical recommendations for the political and societal actions needed to increase resilience and adapt to the anticipated consequences of climate change.
As the project progresses, the collaboration between the partners will focus on producing a workflow with users that combines information on climate risk and sectoral data. This large project has been structured across six work packages and WEMC will lead work package 3 to produce a Decision Support System and head the communications on user adoption and engagement with the international community.
Through co-design with stakeholders, CROSSEU aims to provide practical ways for users in multiple sectors, and from national to local levels, to investigate the costs of existing and emerging socio-economic risks and opportunities.
For each CROSSEU case study, results will be derived from thorough analysis and modelling, based on: relevant future climate-socio-economic pathways; biogeophysical climate risk assessments; and account for modelling uncertainties. Hence CROSSEU will enable better-informed and robust decision-making.
WEMC’s expertise in taking diverse data through to visualisation using Teal will be invaluable for this project, as will the opportunity to build upon collaborations from current and previous projects: EDF in previous C3S projects, LGI in FOCUS-Africa, and University of East Anglia in SECLI-FIRM.
