Network Project
The H2020 PROVIDE project is working to build an interactive web tool that displays the impacts of exceeding a 1.5°C temperature threshold on human activities and industries. Built for everyday users and adaptation practitioners alike, the PROVIDE Climate Services Dashboard uses high-resolution modelling on a variety of spatial scales, allowing climate impacts to be explored under different global warming scenarios. The goal of the project is to allow risk thresholds to be the starting point for adaptation planning.
The 1.5°C Paris Agreement long-term temperature goal guides global climate action to avoid the most devastating impacts of climate change. However, under current emissions trajectories, overshooting 1.5°C is a distinct possibility. Even if we only temporarily exceed 1.5°C in the near term, we could still cross climate thresholds, tipping the climate system into a new state, which would severely limit our adaptation options.
The PROVIDE project aims to reverse the impact chain to allow researchers, everyday users, and adaptation practitioners to set risk thresholds for societal impacts (e.g. health issues due to heatwaves) caused by geophysical impacts (e.g. sea-level rise) so that they can analyse under which conditions these impacts can be avoided.
To achieve this, we are developing our tool with a framework of multiple temperature overshoot pathways, using a chain of computationally light-weight climate emulators that operate across scales (global, regional, and urban cities).
The output tool – the PROVIDE Climate Services Dashboard – will be an online platform providing detailed information on temperature overshoot scenarios and their expected impacts on human industries and activities, including extreme events, biodiversity loss, cryosphere loss, sea-level rise, and the effects on agriculture, economies, socio-economic vulnerabilities, and others. The information will include global, national, and city-level modelling results.
Methodology
First, PROVIDE will link global emissions pathways to sectoral impacts, such as agriculture or infrastructure across spatial scales and urban climate risk projections. High-resolution modelling will be carried out for 140 cities, 100 of which are European.
Second, PROVIDE will assess the risks of high-overshoot global warming scenarios (overshooting the 1.5 C temperature threshold) and the potentially irreversible impacts of exceeding these thresholds, including sea-level rise, permafrost loss, glacier loss and biodiversity loss, on human sectors and industries.
Third, PROVIDE will explore global and regional climate change risks and impacts under current emissions pathways in countries’ climate targets vs Paris Agreement limits and overshoot implications.
Finally, the PROVIDE project will offer an additional overshoot proofing methodology as a tool within the Climate Services Dashboard. The overshoot proofing methodology will supplement existing adaptation decision-support tools and apply to national and local adaptation policies worldwide and their related decision-making frameworks. PROVIDE will then use the overshoot proofing methodology to two EU sectoral adaptation strategies: agriculture and infrastructure. The data’s design and presentation will be co-developed together with stakeholders.
Four iconic regions and cities
We have identified four representative regions (where physical risks overlay with specific socio-economic vulnerabilities) as case studies where more detailed information will be available in the online tool. We will develop the case studies in close collaboration with local and regional stakeholders.
We hope these regions will provide entry points for raising awareness about the need for enhanced adaptation action under overshoot scenarios and offer a practical testbed for generalisable urban planning approaches.
The four regions are the Arctic Fennoscandia and the city of Bodø, Norway; the Iberian Mediterranean and the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, Portugal; the Indus Basin and the city of Islamabad, Pakistan; and the Caribbean small islands and the city of Nassau, The Bahamas.
Project Partners
- Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
- Vlaamse Instelling Voor Technologisch Onderzoek N.V.
- BUUR | bureau voor urbanisme cvba
- CICERO Senter Klimaforskning Stiftelse
- Commissariat à L’Énergie Atomique et aux Énergies Alternatives
- Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique CNRS
- FCIENCIAS.ID – Associacao Para a Investigacao e Desenvolvimento de Ciencias
- Weather and Climate Services Limited
- Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine
- Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich
- Universität Bern
- Universität Innsbruck
- University of East Anglia
- ARTTIC Innovation GmbH
- Nordlandsforskning AS
- University of British Columbia
More information
Find more information on the project’s website.
Photo credits: Eveline de Bruin from Pixabay
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