AMIGO SRL

Most of the developing countries are widely recognised to be vulnerable to climate risks. Climate-related disasters are already undermining record growth across the world, threatening hard-won gains and vulnerable populations’ lives and livelihoods; increasing climate volatility can only exacerbate this and counteract the investments being made by countries to mitigate, prepare for and manage current weather risks. Amigo is currently working on an international funded project called eXtreme Climate Facility (XCF) and it is developing a specific multi-hazard Extreme Climate Index (ECI). This index would be based on meteorological data and designed to capture the severity and frequency of heat, drought, flood and other extreme weather events. In order to create financial vehicles that tracks the frequency and magnitude of extreme climate shocks in developing countries and provides additional financing for countries already managing their current climate risks, it becomes necessary to develop specific methodologies to identify the changes in the frequency of extreme events as also requested by international organization and countries. With such instruments, the disbursement of climate adaptation funds to countries would be entirely data-driven over a 30 year, or some long term, adaptation period; if there are no significant increases in the frequency or magnitude of extreme weather events over current climatology, then no payments would be made. Where payments are made, countries would use those funds to invest in Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) or climate change adaption measures specified in pre-defined country-level adaptation plans. In this framework, the first level Objective of the project CaseXtreme is to identify a suitable metric for the Statistical Significance of Changes in the Statistics of Extremes (SSCSE) in order to provide the baseline for the design of innovative financial products and risk management tools.

A crucial problem affecting insurance and reinsurance companies in climate index-based risk transfer schemes is the lack of a trusted, transparent, independent and affordable way to design, compute and monitor the underpinning climate indices. AMIGO - as an innovative SME providing climate solutions to international organizations, insurers and reinsurers, for the management of climate related risk in the agricultural sector - has developed a new generation of methods and tools for climate risk management. AMIGOclimate integrates into one web platform climate modelling, ground-based and remotely sensed measures of weather variables to provide high level software capabilities for customised climate risk assessment globally, including climate index computation, visualization and reporting. With AMIGOclimate we change radically the use of climate data and climate information in the climate risk management industry, since customers will be able to perform tailored analysis for the index-based insurance industry, getting automatically maps and reports; effectively calculating premiums. Compared to existing solutions AMIGOclimate is more performing and scalable, easier to use, cloud-based, cheaper and it offers over time continuity for monitoring indices, thus assuring economic benefits to customers. AMIGOclimate allows customers to enter a huge variety of data that could be customized according to users’ needs. After having identified the key clients and their needs, the market, the competitor arena, the technical risks connected with the integration of different information; with this proposal we would like to: 1) demonstrate AMIGOclimate feasibility to finalise the platform development within two years; 2) confirm a full business plan for the development and commercialization of the platform and its modular services chiefly to the insurance industry. We expect a ROI of 8% in 4 years.

Air Transport has for a long time been linked to environmental issues like pollution, noise and climate change. Aviation emissions, such as carbon dioxide (CO2), water vapour (H2O), nitrogen oxides (NOx), soot and sulphate aerosols, alter the concentration of atmospheric Greenhouse gases and trigger the formation of contrails and cirrus clouds. The share of aviation amongst all anthropogenic CO2 emissions is about 2% (ATAG). However, studies estimate the climate impact from aviation for the year 2005 including non-CO2 emissions to roughly 5% of the total anthropogenic radiative forcing (Lee et al., 2010). Considering the projected growth of air traffic for the next decades of 5% (RPK) per year, aviation’s share of the total anthropogenic climate impact is expected to increase further. Consequently, intergovernmental organizations, aircraft manufacturers and operators and the research community are increasingly focusing on different technological, operational and regulatory climate impact mitigation options. In this framework, ClimOP aims to identify, evaluate and support the implementation of mitigation strategies to initiate and foster operational improvements which reduce the climate impact of the aviation sector. Operational improvements correspond to any operational measure or action taken through time in order to improve the current provision of aviation operations. The overall objective of ClimOp is to define actions and advice for policymakers by proposing a set of most promising and harmonized mitigation strategies.

The central objective of FOCUS-Africa is to develop sustainable tailored climate services in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region for four sectors: agriculture and food security, water, energy and infrastructure. The proposed co-production amongst end-users, climate scientists and sectoral service providers will ensure that the full value chain for the delivery of the climate services is effectively realised. This will be demonstrated by piloting eight case studies in six countries involving a wide range of end-uses to illustrate how the application of new climate forecasts, projections, resources from Copernicus, GFCS and other relevant products can maximise socio-economic benefits in the Southern Africa region and potentially in the whole of Africa. An innovative aspect of FOCUS-Africa is to address the recurring sustainability and exploitation challenge of climate services in Africa. To achieve this, it will assess dynamically the socio-economic value of the proposed services during the development of the prototypes to better adapt pilot products to the local situation. End-users and service providers will be fully involved in the definition of the associated exploitation strategies using the innovative Flourishing Business Canvas to design business models that are socially beneficial, gender-sensitive, environmentally regenerative and financially viable. This approach will ensure that each of the co-designed climate product can be operationalised through WMO operational infrastructure (e.g. ECMWF, Regional Climate Centres and National Meteorological and Hydrological Services) in support of sustained country level service delivery on regional and global scales. Ultimately, FOCUS-Africa climate services are expected to become a fundamental part of sectorial adaptation strategies at different levels (from local to national and regional) and contribute to the implementation of Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals

There is rising concern that several subsystems of the Earth may respond highly nonlinearly at critical future levels of anthropogenic forcing; these levels have recently been associated with tipping points (TPs). It is paramount to identify safe operating spaces for humanity and the planet in terms of these critical forcing levels, in order to prevent harmful transitions to alternative, undesirable states of the Earth system. The mechanisms leading to such abrupt transitions are only partly understood, and further research in this regard is urgently needed. State-of-art Earth System Models appear to respond too smoothly at TPs and have difficulties in simulating abrupt transitions that occurred in the planet’s history. TiPES will address these problems from several angles: 1. The project will identify subsystems that may exhibit abrupt transitions, and couplings between them, by focussing on paleoclimatic records and abrupt transitions therein. Novel methods to detect Early Warning Signals of forthcoming TPs, and to make skilful predictions on their basis, will be developed. 2. The potential shortcomings of models in representing TPs will be evaluated; in particular, TiPES will investigate how Bayesian calibration techniques can help enable these models to simulate past abrupt transitions. 3. TiPES will develop a generalized theory of climate sensitivity that accounts for the presence of TPs and feedbacks across various time scales. 4. To define safe operating spaces. TiPES will focus on dynamical system theory and on global stability notions for non-autonomous systems in order to estimate the stability of desirable states. 5. The results obtained by the project will be communicated to policy makers in a manner that facilitates decisions and their implementation. TiPES will develop formal approaches to define the socioeconomic risks of crossing TPs, and to derive decision strategies to keep anthropogenic forcing below levels where abrupt transitions may occur.