Background

Work Package 4 is all about making EUCP data and results useful for people and organisations, including end users such as public sector policymakers, business organisations and purveyors of climate services. To achieve this, Work Package 4 is working on pulling together the new scientific findings of Work Packages 1, 2, 3 and 5 and demonstrating their utility in user-relevant applications. This work will establish a reliable and quality-assured way of translating climate predictions into indicators of climate impacts, co-designed and co-developed with relevant end users and other partners. These indicators, incorporating scientific findings from across EUCP, are supporting progress monitoring for the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals and relevant targets of the EU Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR), while also supporting various sectors and priority areas of the Global Framework for Climate Services (e.g. water, energy, agriculture and food security, disaster risk reduction, health, urban environments). Work Package 4 works closely with other teams in EUCP; a key set of inputs for this analysis are the high-resolution climate projections of rainfall, wind and other relevant variables provided by Work Package 2. WP4 also presents Work Package 3’s high-resolution simulations of extreme weather events in an appropriate way for end users.

Objectives

Work Package 4 is primarily associated with EUCP objectives 2 and 3, working to pursue the following main objectives:

  • Conduct an assessment of what users need from the EUCP system.
  • Develop an outlook of trends in pan-European hydro-meteorological hazards for the near term (1-40 years) based on a number of climate models.
  • Develop sectoral and cross-sectoral indicators to assess future hydro-meteorological risks (e.g. flash flood, river flood, storm surge, drought, heat waves) at various user-relevant spatial scales, in support of monitoring UN Sustainable Development Goals SDGs 6 and 13 for the near term (1-40 years), covering clean water, sanitation and climate action.
  • Advance attribution of hydro-meteorological events and impacts to both climatic and non-climatic (e.g. population growth and socio-economic development) drivers, demonstrating where and why hydro-meteorological risks will be amplified in Europe in the near term.
  • Develop an event catalogue of past and future impacts for various sectors.
  • Validate usability of the EUCP service products with and by end users (public sector, private sector, science and the general public).

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