ClearClimate aims to establish an international and interdisciplinary network, focusing on enhancing Climate Information Services (CIS) in south-eastern Europe and support people in interpreting and adapting to climate change.
Context
The drastic impact of climate change in 2022 was evident through extreme weather events like record droughts, wildfires, and floods in Europe. These extremes affected communities, causing food and water shortages. Europe faced one of its worst droughts in 500 years, leading to intense heatwaves. The Balkans became a hotspot for droughts and heatwaves, impacting agriculture severely. However, there’s a disparity in how Eastern and Western Europe perceive and respond to climate change.
Despite efforts to provide climate information for adaptation, there are gaps in reaching and aiding those affected. ClearClimate aims to bridge these gaps by focusing on Climate Information Services (CIS) in South-Eastern Europe (SEE) and the Mediterranean. The project seeks to understand barriers and motivations for using CIS, especially in regions with fewer service providers. ClearClimate aligns with UN Sustainable Development Goals, emphasizing urgent action against climate change. It aims to rewrite the narrative by focusing not just on data but on societal change, integrating social sciences for more effective climate services.
Objectives
- To unleash the power of co-creation, co-design, co-development to make Climate Information Services (CIS) more people-centred and ensure they are standardized and of high quality addressing the lack of providers in South East Europe (SEE).
- Enhance CIS with explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) systems tailored for SEE. These systems will analyze climate extremes, providing trustworthy predictions to aid decision-makers and overcome obstacles like lack of understanding, trust, and awareness among users.
- Utilize human-centered XAI to explain factors influencing weather patterns, such as topography, land use, and meteorological conditions. This objective aims to improve predictions of extreme weather events like floods in SEE, assisting in urban planning and community protection.
- Effectively communicate climate change impacts and risks associated with extreme weather events using neuromarketing approaches. Storytelling methods will be employed to engage users and improve information transfer to all citizens in SEE.
- Train researchers, through interdisciplinary secondments, to develop skills for making climate services focused on users. Workshops will cover all development stages, improving their ability to create climate services for SEE users.
Activities
- Defining Requirements: organisation, CIS, audiences, services, stakeholders, users, and workshops
- Human centred Explainable Artificial Intelligence for developing Climate Services
- Temporal downscaling of extremes for using novel approaches (select cities as case studies)
- Storytelling approach in climate extremes and use in CIS
- Training and Knowledge Exchange
Resources
- Preliminary report on user preferences and user-cantered design
- Roadmap of collaboration among WPs
- Report on integrating local knowledge to transform scientific data into user centered information
- Final report on user preferences and user-centred design
- Assessment and comparison of AI-based climate information services
- Experiments implementation
- Experiments implementation II
- Evaluation report
- Preliminary assessment and comparison of state-of-the-art methods for forecasts and projections of hourly extremes
- Experiments implementation – initial version
- Experiments implementation
- Report on Case studies
- Evaluation report
- Preliminary report on user testing
- Preliminary report on neuromarketing
- Final report on user testing
- Final report on neuromarketing
- Storytelling framework
Impact
- Expected Scientific Impact: Empowered scholars in understanding climate extremes, enhanced Europe’s human capital in Research & Innovation (R&I) through a multidisciplinary network, and fostered an inclusive research environment in CIS, particularly in South East Europe.
- Expected Economic/Technological Impact: Developed valuable assets for industries, facilitated climate-resilient models and services, thereby enhanced effective communication, and reduced costs related to extreme events in South East Europe.
- Expected Societal Impact: Targeted policymakers and vulnerable groups in South East Europe, offered insights and accessible Climate Information Services to drive better policies for economic renewal and societal well-being through innovation-driven approaches.
Partners
- University of Novi Sad Faculty of Sciences (Serbia) – Coordinator
- Wageningen University (Netherlands)
- Loughborough University (United Kingdom)
- Universitat Autonoma De Barcelona (Spain)
- Swps Uniwersytet (Poland)
- Climate Adaptation Services (Netherlands)
- Predictia Intelligent Data Solutions (Spain)
- University for Development Studies (Ghana)
- Previsico LTD (United Kingdom)
- CESIE (Italy)
