IMproving PRedictions and management of hydrological EXtremes For a better anticipation on future high impact hydrological extremes disrupting safety of citizens, agricultural production, transportation, energy production and urban water supply, and overall economic productivity, prediction and foresighting capabilities and their intake in these strategic sectors need to be improved. IMPREX will improve forecast skill of meteorological and hydrological extremes in Europe and their impacts, by applying dynamic model ensembles, process studies, new data assimilation techniques and high resolution modeling. Novel climate change impact assessment concepts will focus at increasing the realism of relevant events by specific high resolution regional downscaling, explore compounding trans-sectoral and trans-regional risks, and design new risk management paradigms. These developments are demonstrated in impact surveys for strategic economic sectors in a set of case studies in which local stakeholders, public organizations and SMEs are involved. A pan-European assessment of risk management and adaptation strategies is applied, minimizing risk transfer from one sector or region to another. As a key outreach product, a periodic hydrological risk outlook for Europe is produced, incorporating the dynamic evolution of hydro-climatic and socio-economic processes. The project outreach maximizes the legacy impact of the surveys, aimed at European public stakeholder and business networks, including user-friendly assessment summaries, and training material. The project responds to the call by targeting the quality of short-to-medium hydro-meteorological predictions, enhancing the reliability of future climate projections, apply this information to strategic sectoral and pan-European surveys at different scales, and evaluate and adapt current risk management strategies. With its integrative approach, IMPREX will link current management decisions and actions with an emergent future.

Earth system models (ESM) show diverging estimates of ecosystem carbon (C) uptake which drives persistent uncertainty about future climate and limits the realization of policy mitigation goals. The CONCERTO project aims to strengthen the European research ecosystem by creating an innovative scientific collaborative framework that enhances our understanding, monitoring, and modelling of the terrestrial cycle (CC), and leads to reduced uncertainty and ESM convergence. This framework has three main elements: the exploitation of novel Earth Observation (EO) data, the innovation of process models fed by these data, and Data Assimilation (DA) and Machine Learning (ML) techniques. The consortium includes European experts and institutes active in these areas. CONCERTO will advance the representation of land cover, leaf area index (LAI) and management intensity through new maps of high resolution with layers relevant for the CC. The new management map will enhance the creation of a new biomass production map. Further, CONCERTO will prepare for the ingestion of FLEX data in land surface models (LSM) through DA, and exploit Sentinel-5P/TROPOMI HCHO indicative of biogenic volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions. As step towards moving away from prior (static) parameterizations, the novel P model will be used to ingest these new data sources. This will enhance understanding of ecosystems responses to climate extremes, fires, and vegetation recovery from them, and the parameterization of LSMs included in ESMs. Novel representations of the underrepresented processes of lateral carbon fluxes through outgassing of CO2 from rivers will be developed. Dedicated seasonal and climate experiments will demonstrate how improved representation of land surface processes benefit the accuracy and trustworthiness of global Earth System simulation. This will lead to better predictability of the influence of land management on the CC and underpin avenues towards carbon neutrality

ClimEmpower will empower five south-European regions with high Climate Change (CC) risk and exceptionally low adaptive capacity to enhance their CC-resilience, establish the regional Communities of Practice (CoP) and co-create the resilient development strategies adapted to the regional needs and potentials. We will achieve this through combination of user-driven climate applications, capacity building and "best practices" transfer from other European projects and regions. Throughout the project the ClimEmpower team will aid the regional administration in organizing the regional CoPs where representatives of "quadruple helix" stakeholders will discuss their Climate Adaptation needs and capabilities, assess potential pathways towards CC-resilient, societally just, and sustainable future and elect sustainable and CC-resilient regional development pathways that are best suited to their needs and capabilities. This activity will be supported by provision of the data driven Decision Support service(s) for strategic CC-adaptation planning, as well as through provision of easy to understand educational materials illustrating the CC risks and possible technological, natural and societal adaptation options and strategies, explaining the use of the project tools, as well as knowledge transfer on existing data, tools and best practices in climate adaptation from successful EU projects and regions with higher adaptive capacity. ClimEmpower will develop new generic interface to C3S Climate Data Store, data driven CC-hazard and -risk assessment services, and semi-semi-quantitative (“screening”) services allowing the users to compare different adaptation strategies. These services will primarily rely on open data and open service infrastructure and on cross-linking of such data with data that can be sampled locally during the project - to complement the pan-European data, improve granularity or to validate the predictions.