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

LOCALISED focuses on the downscaling of country-level decarbonization pathways to a regional level. From a research point of view, this compels a literature review of existing downscaling methods, experimentation, and an analysis of the results. Furthermore, the downscaling of decarbonization pathways requires, as input, a plethora of data encompassing regional climate conditions, energy supply mix, sectoral energy demand, building stock, population, etc.

Within the project’s workflow, the downscaling results serve as input to further tasks such as the development of a mitigation and adaptation measures optimization model. Should these tasks be postponed until the results of downscaling are ready? The answer is NO! We, the members involved in the LOCALISED project, strongly believe that agile software development [1] is as relevant in research as it is in industrial applications. Therefore, within the scope of the LOCALISED project, we work on each software development task iteratively in order to avoid bottlenecks in the project workflow.

There have been two major iterations of the downscaling task thus far:

Iteration 1: The developed decarbonization pathways [2] were downscaled using a simple approach whereby the values at the country level are distributed to its regions using the regional population as a proxy indicator. This method is depicted in Figure 1. We saved the results and made these available to the partners.

This process not only allowed us to provide the first downscaled results to the partners but also to create a skeleton-codebase that could be used to perform further work on the downscaling methods.

Iteration 2: We designed a database and an API that enables our partners to query the data, thus eliminating the need for the circulation of files containing the results of disaggregation.

It is planned that the results of downscaling will be provided to end-users via an open access data-sharing platform. This iteration has allowed us to create a skeleton data-sharing platform.

Through the established feedback process within the project, the downscaling methods and the software infrastructure are improving continuously. An update regarding open sourcing the data-sharing platform will follow soon.

References:

[1] Abrahamsson, Pekka, et al. “Agile software development methods: Review and analysis.” arXiv preprint arXiv:1709.08439 (2017).

[2] https://www.localised-project.eu/wp-content/uploads/2022/09/LOCALISED_D2.1_Decarbonisation_scenarios.pdf

The negative consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic are innumerable, be they health, economic, technological, or social. However, once much of the storm has already passed, we can learn and improve our society from it. Using this idea as a starting point, the Catalonian Energy Research Centre (IREC) collectively with researchers from of the Group of Construction Research and Innovation of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia (UPC -GRIC) launched the project ComMit-20 with the aim of establishing the long and short-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic concerning energy consumption, changes in usage patterns, and increased indoor environmental quality requirements in buildings.

Even though it is certain that one of the main impacts of COVID-19 was on city wellbeing and health, the power grid system has not been an exception from the pandemic’s impacts.  Confinements and changes in consumption patterns put the grid system to the test, such as increased electricity demand in urban areas that did not have sufficient capacity to supply it. Consequently, the grid had to adapt to scenarios that may have seemed impossible before. This critical and unprecedented situation brought to the table once again one of the most studied characteristics of electricity grids in recent years: power grid resilience.

Until a few years ago, there was no distinction between the reliability and resilience power grid and in fact, both concepts referred to similar meanings. However, their differentiation appeared due to the necessity to address high-impact-low-probability (HILP) events, in other words, occasionally events capable of massively damaging the system. Moreover, three different hazard events are analyzed in the field of power grid resilience:

• Sudden changes in the use of the network infrastructure (e.g., the paradigm caused by the Covid-19 pandemic).
• Catastrophic weather events (being more and more severe because of climate change).
• Cyberattacks.

Considering these three aspects, and within the framework of ComMit-20, IREC has been focused on making the electricity grid more resilient to HILP events, which are expected to increase their frequency and make the grid more vulnerable. As a part of the task, a study on the resilience of Barcelona’s electricity grid was conducted, with the aim of analyzing long-term impacts of HILP events. As an example, simulations of disruptive scenarios for 500-years flood scenarios were carried out using technical data of the power grid and socio-economic data of Barcelona to give it a more multi-perspective view.

The results obtained from the study showed that almost 20% of the city’s substations would have a moderate or higher probability of failure, which could lead to a cascading breakdown of the system. Moreover, the impact of this catastrophic weather event would not be uniform across the city, and some neighborhoods would be more susceptible to flooding.

One possible solution to mitigate those impacts and increase the power grid resilience would be the installation of renewable energies in those risk areas. This adaptive measure would help compensate for that energy not delivered in those points where the grid could fail, and at the same time, it would help to decarbonise the city and to reach the net-zero scenario. In this way, this measure would not only mitigate the impacts of the event, but also help adapt to climate change by decreasing the frequency of occurrence of those events.

Inspired by the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Assessment Reports (IPCC AR5 and AR6), LOCALISED developed its business vulnerability assessment framework to reflect the latest knowledge in the field of climate change risk assessment.

Using the IPCC Risk Framework, the risk imposed by decarbonization pathways to regional businesses and industries can be calculated through a circular process starting with the identification of hazard as a set of environmental, economic, and social changes induced by the pathways. The vulnerability then will be calculated along different dimensions such as energy demand, labour, raw materials, demand, supply, logistics, final output, emissions, and the geographic location of the business entity.

This framework allows LOCALISED to investigate the impact of downscaled decarbonization pathways on businesses and industries in terms of their exposure to direct and indirect changes in their environment, emissions, energy input, supply of raw material, and demand. Businesses may choose to respond differently to such changes depending on their sensitivity and vulnerability.

LOCALISED is in the process of identifying and engaging with key business stakeholders in order to co-design the vulnerability index tailored to the needs and ambitions of each business sector. The vulnerability assessment helps businesses in identifying their sensitivities and strengths compared to their peers and to pave the way for strengthening their competitiveness.