CLARITY
Integrated Climate Adaptation Service Tools for Improving Resilience Measure Efficiency.
The EU-funded project set out to help city planners, road planners and policymakers’ efforts to easily identify and mitigate climate change risks. The project worked to create a digital tool and online platforms to bring the latest scientific knowledge in a tailored way to end-users in cities and regions. The tool can help in taking the informed decisions to ensure that the urban and traffic infrastructure they are responsible for is more climate resilient. Four demonstration cases in Italy, Sweden, Austria and Spain were used to show the potential of CLARITY climate services in relation to different hazards and urban infrastructure project type.
CLARITY Project team has developed a generic methodology that is appropriate for both expert and screening studies and aligned with the IPCC-AR5 approach. Following CLARITY “screening” models were developed. These models rely on CLARITY algorithms for extracting detailed information from various openly available data sources. Finally, a set of adaptation options and adaptation strategies was defined, and the ad-hoc models estimating their effects on local hazard distribution and mitigation of climate change impacts were also implemented. In addition, the project has developed an online marketplace that facilitates matching the regional offers and demand for climate adaptation know-how, products and services. Typical CLARITY user workflow from the initial Screening to Expert Services and Marketplace, is designed to facilitate the identification, uptake and integration of adaptation measures within urban infrastructure projects, limiting the burden of data collection activities and simulations from the user side, going beyond generic urban adaptation guidelines, and providing a solution tailored to the specific settlement and project context. CLARITY expert studies were recognised valuable inputs for strategic climate mitigation planning and contributed to development of such plans in the four demostartion case regions.