Euporias

Whilst societies have flourished or collapsed according to their ability of dealing with climate variability and change it is only recently that we have acquired the ability to predict future environmental conditions. EUPORIAS, a project recently funded by the European commission under the 7th framework program, intended to improve our ability to maximise the societal benefit of these new technologies. Working in close relation with a number of European stakeholders, this project developed a few fully working prototypes of climate services addressing the need of specific users. The time horizon is set between a month and a year ahead with the aim of extending it towards the more challenging decadal scale. 24 project-partners, representing a diverse community ranging from UN organisations to small enterprises, worked together to increase the resilience of the European Society to climate change, demonstrating how climate information can become directly usable by decision makers in different sectors. EUPORIAS was a four-year collaborative project funded by the European commission under the seventh framework programme, that started on November 2012.

Among other results, we developed an app to highlight the usefulness of probabilistic climate predictions for wind resources, as well as another app to provide farmers with seasonal climate predictions.

Aims and objectives:

• To develop and deliver a reliable and trusted impact prediction system for two or three semi-operational prototypes. These will provide working examples of 'end-to-end' climate-to-impacts-to-decision-making services operating on the Seasonal and Decadal (S2D) time scales.
• To assess and document key knowledge gaps and vulnerabilities of important sectors (e.g. Water, Energy, Transport, Food security, Health, etc.) along with the needs of specific user s within these sectors, through close collaboration with project stakeholders.
• To develop a set of standard tools and techniques tailored to the needs of stakeholders for calibrating, downscaling, and modelling sector-specific impacts on S2D timescales.
• To develop a knowledge-sharing protocol necessary to promote the use of these technologies.
• To assess and document the current marketability of climate services in Europe.

Our vision is that by developing end-to-end impact prediction services, operating on S2D timescales, and clearly demonstrating their value in informing decision–making, we will stimulate a market for these new tools. In doing so, we will increase the competitiveness of EU businesses, and the ability of EU regional and national authorities to make effective decisions in climate-sensitive sectors.

More info at euporias.eu