While future sea-level rise is recognized to be a major threat to coasts, sea-level rise related information currently available is not customized to the practice of coastal adaptation, which requires services tailored to users’ needs including full information on uncertainties, high-end estimates, accurate storm and flood modeling, shoreline change projections and relevant adaptation options within the context of current practices and governance arrangements. The INSeaPTION project aims at addressing these limitations by co-designing and co-developing, together with users, coastal climate services based on state-of-the art sea-level rise, impact, adaptation and transdisciplinary science. The project will deliver coastal climate services based on end-users' needs and their decision and governance context, covering the whole chain of climate service development from global to regional mean and extreme sea-level projections with their impacts and uncertainties to local sea-level, coastal impacts and adaptation pathways. As tropical islands are high impact sectors and currently receive little attention, we select Maldives and French Polynesia as pilot sites for local coastal climate services. Both global and local services address the committed impacts of sea-level rise and potential large adaptation needs arising in the case polar ice-sheets melt rapidly. INSeaPTION involves climate, impact and social scientists as well as practitioners of coastal adaptation, building on previous interactions between users and the project partners. The project’s transdiciplinary approach combines continuous interactions with users of both the global and local services to be developed with cutting edge sea-level, impact modeling, decision making and governance research. INSeaPTION contributes to the World Climate Research Programme Grand Challenge “Regional sea-level rise &coastal impacts” and to its objective to elaborate services in support to adaptation.

This project addresses the coproduction of climate-impacts knowledge, in a hands-on collaboration between scientists and users such as climate-adaptation-policy experts and other stakeholders. The project team boasts world-class experts in science-policy dialogue, cross-sectoral impacts research and research coordination, and scientific excellence in impacts modelling. The end product is an open climate-impacts service portal, ISIpedia, offering tailored access to state-of-the-art climate-impacts assessments and data, based on the cross-sectoral, multi-model simulations conducted within the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP, www.isimip.org). ISIpedia’s development will integrate the full chain of climate-impact-service co-development, from research design and implementation, to delivery, with tasks fulfilled by the ISIMIP team, a Stakeholder Engagement Team (SET), and the ISIpedia Assessment and Editorial Team (AET). ISIpedia users may include climate adaptation planners e.g. involved in National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) and implementation practitioners, regional knowledge hubs, trans- and interdisciplinary scientists including climate economists, and regional climate experts from the private sector such as (re-)insurance companies. Four key tasks will be undertaken: 1) stakeholder-supported selection of focus topics and development of the scenario design for the next ISIMIP simulation round; 2) co-development of societally- and user-relevant impacts indicators based on the (bio-)physical projections generated within ISIMIP, such as “number of people affected”, “economic damages” or indicators related to the Sustainability Development Goals; 3) provision of input data and coordination of cross-sectoral impact-modelling activities within ISIMIP, and 4) establishment of a new online platform ISIpedia to provide informed access to simulation data, regional, cross-sectoral impact assessments based on ISIMIP data, and co-developed indicators.

ANR-PROTECT is a fund-raising project aiming to consolidate an ongoing initiative to federate the leading European research institutes working on the contribution of land ice melt to sea-level rise. The consortium thus established will apply to the H2020 call LC-CLA-07-2019: “The changing cryosphere: uncertainties, risks and opportunities”, specifically the action on sea level changes. The foundation of a very strong multidisciplinary consortium is already laid, bringing together the leading European experts on (i) atmosphere and surface mass balance of ice sheets and glaciers, (ii) ocean and sub ice shelf melting, (ii) ice sheet flow, (iv) the coupling of these components, (v) mass balance of mountain glaciers, (vi) regional sea level changes and (vii) coastal impacts. In accordance with the requirements of LC-CLA-07-2019, the expertise of the PROTECT consortium will allow to tackle the essential societal issue of improving the regional and local projections of sea level change by including a better representation of the evolution of the cryosphere mass balance.