The first workshop on the EU Business Vulnerability Assessment was held in Milan, Italy on the morning of November 29, 2022. The workshop included participants from 3 LOCALISED partner entities: CMCC, Assolombarda, and T6 and representatives from 7 business members of Assolombarda.

The workshop started by the introduction to the LOCALISED project, its aim, scope, and outcomes. The CMCC team then presented the envisioned procedure for assessing the vulnerability of EU businesses at the NUTS 2 level and presented the draft of a questionnaire designed to solicit information about businesses and their vulnerability along multiple dimensions of energy, workforce, technology, raw materials, output and supply chain, regulations, and finance.

During the Q&A session following the presentations, the participants expressed their opinion about the overall survey and commented on how to improve its reach. In particular, the main comments were concerned about:

• How to customise survey for businesses in different sectors
• How to include background information about sectoral vulnerability from other sources
• How to include more dimensions to vulnerability assessment

The LOCALISED team will follow-up with the business representative for any additional comments and questions to finalise and improve the survey and make it ready for the next phase.

On November 29, Fondazione Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC) and Assolombarda, an associated partner of LOCALISED, will host a joint workshop on evaluating the vulnerability of businesses in the Lombardy region of Italy to climate change and decarbonization pathways.

Assolombarda is an association of companies operating in the Metropolitan City of Milan and in the provinces of Lodi, Monza and Brianza. The representatives from 6 businesses in different sectors of mechatronics, food processing, and transportation will discuss ways in which decarbonization pathways affect their operation. The emphasis will be on identifying questions regarding vulnerability along 7 major dimensions: energy, labour, technology, input, output, supply chain, and finance.

A draft of a survey designed for mass distribution among EU businesses in the next phase of the project will be discussed and the feedback from the participants will help improve the scope and methodology of the survey.

This year, the Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC (COP27) has taken place in Sharm El-Sheikh, Egypt. The COP27 was a great opportunity for all stakeholders involved in the challenge of tackling climate change to meet and discuss multilateral and collective actions to address this truly global threat. COP27 was called the “implementation COP” and transported high hopes for major steps forward in implementing the Paris Agreement and preparing for the First Global Stocktake of the Paris Agreement, in 2023, and the related Global Goal on Adaptation. 

Diana Reckien, member of the IPCC AR6 — the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and Associate Professor of University of Twente (UT) – and a LOCALISED partner – participated in the conference as part of the IPCC WGII Author team – delivering the latest information of the impacts, adaptation and vulnerability to climate change.

Diana was involved in sessions that discussed the multidimensionality of our needed societal responses, including adaptation, mitigation, and sustainable development – something called Climate Resilient Development in the latest IPCC AR6 WGII report.

Look at the event again here: Climate Resilient Development: How to make shifts towards a sustainable future for all? – YouTube

Diana was also part of an event highlighting the importance of gender aspects to be considered in all our responses to climate change–an event that culminated in a role play on the gender sensitivity of climate impacts and adaptation approaches.

Look at the event again here: Gender, Climate Justice and Gender-Transformative Adaptation Pathways – YouTube

The event was also a good occasion to create awareness about the LOCALISED project and its activities – very much working on the implementation of a holistic Climate Resilient Development approach in responding to climate change.

LOCALISED is an EU-funded research project which is providing downscaled national decarbonisation trajectories, and thereby helps to upscale the definition and implementation of mitigation and adaptation measures from the local level. The project pulls together a multidisciplinary consortium including experienced institutions in the science of multi-sectoral energy transition, economic analysis, urban adaptation and climate impacts, policy consultants, and citizen engagement and communication experts.

In assessing feasible mitigation and adaptation measures in a particular region, immediate-context conditions should be considered (Williams et al., 2021; Rempel et al., 2022; Busch et al., 2022; Jewell and Cherp, 2020; IPCC, 2022). However, existing studies are conducted globally to assess feasible mitigation or adaptation measures. This contradiction leads to high uncertainty when selecting the most appropriate measures for a region to reach its decarbonisation goal. This dichotomy is one of the reasons for the existing gap in the implementation of adaptation and mitigation pathways. According to the data from the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) database – an initiative where cities and regions report the state of their climate actions – just around 30% of all planned climate actions in Europe have already been implemented. The same patterns are followed when looking at the implementation status of European mitigation and adaptation plans reported in that database (CDP).

Moreover, climate change impacts do not understand administrative borders, and cross-border considerations are needed to appropriate climate planning (Carter et al., 2021; Benzie and Persson, 2019). In the CDP database, about 20% of the localities admitted the need to rescale their plan to a broader scale. Therefore, covering a regional scale rather than localities could help improve climate planning since it covers a larger area and allows one to focus on the immediate context. LOCALISED is covering EU-28 by using NUTS3 regions as the target scale.

NUTS3 regions are the smallest statistical unit in Europe, according to the Eurostat-EC (2021), with 1.166 of them. Those regions are categorised into Tercet. Tercet is a regulation initiative that aims to integrate typologies into regulation and policy planning in the EU28, based on typologies created by Eurostat, DG Regio, the Joint Research Centre, and the OECD: the urban-rural typology, the coastal typology, and the metropolitan typology. However, Tercet is not yet visible in climate planning. Previous research on monitoring climate plans shows a considerable climate response at the local scale but not at the regional scale. Just 3.36% of the mitigation plans and 5.51% of the adaptation plans reported to the CDP database come from a regional perspective. Moreover, after checking for local governments with regional decision-making capacity with a public and available climate plan, it has been found that just 154 out of the 1.166 NUTS3 regions are covered.

As LOCALISED will use NUTS3 regions as territorial units, relevant contributions are expected to improve climate planning at an appropriate scale.

Authors: University of Twente, Gerard Martínez Görbig, dr. Diana Reckien, dr. Johannes Flacke.

References:

Benzie, M., Persson, Å. Governing borderless climate risks: moving beyond the territorial framing of adaptation. Int Environ Agreements 19, 369–393 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-019-09441-y

Busch, P., Kendall, A., Murphy, C. W., & Miller, S. A. (2022). Literature review on policies to mitigate GHG emissions for cement and concrete. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 182 (November 2021), 106278. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resconrec.2022.106278

Carter, T. R., Benzie, M., Campiglio, E., Carlsen, H., Fronzek, S., Hildén, M., Reyer, C. P. O., & West, C. (2021). A conceptual framework for cross-border impacts of climate change. Global Environmental Change, 69, 102307. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102307

Jewell, J., & Cherp, A. (2020). On the political feasibility of climate change mitigation pathways: Is it too late to keep warming below 1.5°C? WIREs Climate Change, 11(1). https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.621

IPCC, 2022: Climate Change 2022: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability. Contribution of Working Group II to the Sixth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change [H.-O. Pörtner, D.C. Roberts, M. Tignor, E.S. Poloczanska, K. Mintenbeck, A. Alegría, M. Craig, S. Langsdorf, S. Löschke, V. Möller, A. Okem, B. Rama (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press. In Press

Rempel, A., & Gupta, J. (2022). Equitable, effective, and feasible approaches for a prospective fossil fuel transition. WIREs Climate Change, 13(2). https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.756

Williams, P. A., Simpson, N. P., Totin, E., North, M. A., & Trisos, C. H. (2021). Feasibility assessment of climate change adaptation options across Africa: an evidence-based review. Environmental Research Letters, 16(7), 073004. https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac092d

T6 Ecosystems – project partner of LOCALISED – is pleased to participate to IMPETUS, a new Horizon Europe project that will support and give recognition to citizen science (CS) in Europe. The partner will be responsable for the impact assessment and maximisation activities of this new project.

Through an energetic approach, the project team will organise 3 Open Calls that will support new and ongoing citizen science initiatives (CSI). The Open Calls will be partially defined by the project team and will have a strong link with the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Green Deal, but they will be also co-designed with the help of a citizen panel that will support the project also in other tasks.

Another highlight of IMPETUS approach is the setting up of an accelerator, that will provide the funded CSIs with an integrated programme of support, training, mentoring, and resources. The accelerator will facilitate peer learning, enable CSIs to contribute to SDG and GD targets and forge connections with quadruple helix stakeholders.

Besides the Open Calls, IMPETUS will also launch the EU Prize for Citizen Science. It will have 3 prize categories for 3 years: outstanding achievements, diversity and innovative grassroots projects.

Within this supportive landscape, IMPETUS aims to shaping EU policy in and with CS, through horizon scanning, anticipatory policy and action research, informing policy briefs, webinars and workshops with key policy stakeholders