Descripción del proyecto
The European commitment to accelerate efforts for climate change adaptation and climate neutrality by 2050 is embodied in the European Green Deal and supported by the NextGenerationEU Plan. Several countries have already adopted climate-neutral policies that call for radical and transformative ways to increase resilience with the adoption of sector-dependent evaluation and transformative measures and policies. This transformation requires the development of innovative digital solutions adapted to the specific problems faced by the different sectors. In particular, accounting for the impact of climate change requires authoritative climate information (in particular future projections) tailored and adapted to the particular sectoral needs. There is consensus in describing the market for climate projections as huge but it is still largely untapped. The latest Global Climate Risk Disclosure Barometer from E&Y, showed that many companies started to disclose climate change-related risks, but the quality was relatively low. This activity is motivated by recent regulations, at national and European level, which oblige companies in different sectors (e.g. insurance and finance) to periodically assess their exposure and vulnerability to climate change risks. At national level, the MITECO published in 2020 an extensive report entitled Impacts, vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in the insurance activity. The report concludes that there are significant knowledge gaps in the insurance business regarding the use of climate change information. Several sectoral studies have highlighted the difficulties faced by companies in adequately assessing the impact of climate change. In particular, access to ready-to-use tailored climate information (both historical and future projections) that facilitates assessing the sectoral impacts of climate change is identified as a limiting factor. The objective of this project is to develop customised climate services that produce sector-specific climate information to assess the impact of climate change. The solution, a web service with a user-friendly interface, will generate ready-to-use reports for specific sectors and regions making use of authoritative data sources (e.g., the Copernicus Climate Change Service, C3S) as well as standard and well-validated data processing methodologies to produce traceable and auditable climate indices that are relevant to different sectors. The proposal builds on the past experience of the team and its strategic positioning in the context of C3S, having contributed to the development and data provision of some of its components. From a technical point of view, the service will rely heavily on some of the components of the Climadjust system, a web service, launched in 2020, for obtaining customised, bias-adjusted climate projections. It was developed by Predictia in cooperation with IFCA-CSIC and was initially funded by the Copernicus Climate Change Service. Climadjust focuses on providing essential climate variables using scientific data formats. It has been very well taken by researchers with advanced technical expertise. However, as the service is not tailored to any specific sector, private market penetration has been limited. This project will implement a new service to specifically deal with the climate data needs of different sectors, including insurance and financial. To do so, a detailed analysis of these needs will be carried out by interviewing users, analysing scientific literature and existing regulations.The project will be developed by PREDICTIA and IFCA-CSIC, with over ten years of collaboration in the field and with the required scientific and technical knowledge to develop the proposed solution. On one hand, PREDICTIA has wide experience developing climate services from a technical point of view. On the other hand, IFCA-CSIC is an internationally recognized institution in the application of advanced statistics to climate data