FAQ

Research on climate risks in Europe is crucial due to its diverse climate zones and the varied impacts of climate change across these regions on the environment, society and the economy. Our understanding of climate change impacts and risks continues to improve, but knowledge gaps remain. Society is also changing rapidly, so understanding how both the climate and society might change is key to understanding the risks and our options to respond.

We need to prepare for the effects of climate change, such as floods, droughts, heatwaves and shifts in biodiversity, which can have profound consequences and will vary from place to place and through time. This research is essential for informed decision-making and policy development to enhance resilience and adaptation strategies across European nations.

SPARCCLE is a research project dedicated to understanding risks of climate change to the society and economy of Europe.

SPARCCLE will support people, organisations and government make better decisions to reduce risks and build resilience to climate change.

• Development of quantitative methods for assessing climate hazards, damages and risks
• Deliver detailed projections of how society develops, improving understanding of vulnerability to climate change
• Understanding how climate mitigation and adaptation measures can work together or against each other
• Co-creation with public and private stakeholders so that project outputs can inform decision-making
• Explore stress-test scenarios to help Europe prepare for plausible, high-impact socioeconomic climate risks

The project engages with a wide range of stakeholders including policymakers, public & private sectors, scientific communities, and the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre (JRC). Together this comprises our Extended Stakeholder Network. If you’d be interested in hearing about our stakeholder events and outreach, please get in touch via the contact form.

Day-to-day activities in the project are coordinated by the Secretariat, based at IIASA. An Executive Board, comprising one member from each Partner organisation, handles internal project decision-making. The project progress is also reviewed externally by experts appointed by the European Commission, as well as the SPARCCLE Stakeholder Advisory Board (SAB).

This project aims to deepen our understanding of how climate change is impacting various aspects of life in Europe, including ecosystems, economies, and communities. By employing advanced scientific methods and technologies, the project investigates specific changes already underway, projects future impacts under different scenarios, and explores potential adaptation and mitigation strategies.

SPARCCLE will also investigate how climate risks in other regions of the world potentially affect Europe, known as spillover effects. For example, climate impacts might affect the production and supply chains of food, materials, and products in other countries. The effects may be direct, such that there are delays or shortages in supply, or may have impacts such as raising global market prices which affect consumers and competitiveness of business in Europe.

Thus the project involves various activities with global scope, in relation to how  climate impacts in even distant places, may have knock-on effects in Europe.

The project is funded by the European Commission Horizon Europe funding (#101081369) for EU Partners. Additionally, the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), an d UK Research and Innovation fund the associated participation of ETH Zürich and Imperial College London, respectively.

There are several ways to get involved, such as participating in online webinars, staying informed by subscribing to our newsletter, following our updates on LinkedIn and X, and testing out data dashboards when they are released.

• MESMER – An earth system model emulator that generates many simulations of climate variables (e.g. temperatures, precipitation, soil moisture, fire weather, or drought), helping us capture the range of model uncertainties from global earth system models and explore a wide range of future scenarios.

• ISIMIP – A comprehensive data archive of global climate impact model outputs (e.g. from hydrological, crop and fire models). Additionally, SPARCCLE will use an updated dataset on extreme events  (originally developed by Lange et al. 2021), covering events  such as heatwaves, wildfire, floods, droughts, crop failure and tropical cyclones. This dataset will be updated to the ISIMIP3b protocol, aligned with CMIP6 climate forcing data.

• Community Land Model (CTSM) – Using the latest expanded set of ISIMIP3b forcing data, CTSM provides new land, soil and hydrological data, as well as a wide range of high-resolution indicators, including detailed heat stress metrics.

Probabilistic climate hazards:

Temperature

• Annual mean temperature
• Monthly mean temperature
• Annual maximum temperature
• Monthly daily maximum temperature

Precipitation

• Monthly mean precipitation

Fire weather index (FWI)

• Seasonal mean of the Fire weather index

• Length of the fire season

• Annual maximum of the Fire weather index

• Number of days with extreme Fire weather index

• Total soil moisture

• Annual mean soil moisture

• Annual minimum of the monthly mean soil moisture

Ongoing exploratory work on other probabilistic variables

• Daily temperature variability

• Number of wet days (with rain or snow)

• Extreme precipitation (e.g. RX1day)

Compound hazards and climate extremes

• Climate extremes: heatwaves; fires; agricultural drought; meteorological drought

• Compound in space: e.g. multiple fires over Europe the same year

• Compound in time: e.g. reoccurring droughts over breadbaskets regions

• Compound events: e.g. heatwave & drought

Non-probabilistic climate extreme events identified in ISIMIP3b using a storyline approach:

• River floods

• Tropical cyclones

• Crop failures

• Wildfires

• Droughts

• Heatwaves

We assess climate impacts in several ways, using different tools and models: 

• Exposure and Vulnerability Mapping – We analyse how many people may be exposed to extreme climate events using spatial population projections (including age, gender, education and income), and assign thresholds to estimate exposure. This allows us to estimate the number of people at risk under different climate scenarios. 

• Risk assessment with CLIMADA – Similar to exposure mapping, but with an added layer: vulnerability curves which show how damage changes with hazard intensity. When combined with sufficient hazard time-series data, this approach takes a risk perspective by enabling the calculation of impact (hazard x exposure x vulnerability) according to the return period of the hazard. This gives an estimation on the losses caused by climate extremes of different probability. 

• Other sectoral and multi-sectoral models: 

1. CATSIM – uses probabilistic data on economic damages from CLIMADA to estimate the probability of a national fiscal gap, i.e., the likelihood that direct economic losses from climate hazards exceed the government’s response capacity.  
2. CGE models (e.g. GEM-E3, d-PLACE) – can incorporate climate hazard data into sub-modules to assess impacts on labour and resource productivity across multiple economic sectors, with subsequent impacts on GDP, employment and welfare. 
3. Process-based IAMs (e.g. MESSAGEix, IMAGE, GLOBIOM-G4M, PRIMES) – can incorporate climate hazard data to estimate how climate extremes influence energy demand (e.g. space cooling and heating), forestry and biomass supply and costs, thermal power supply, and subsequent impacts on energy supply and demand, energy carries, and greenhouse gas emissions. 
4. Cost-Benefit IAMs (e.g. RICE50+, MIMOSA) – explore trade-offs and synergies between mitigation and adaptation actions, incorporating socio-economic impacts, distributional effects, and welfare changes beyond GDP. Their flexibility allows the inclusion of dynamic feedbacks, such as economic damages from climate extremes and the persistence of climate shocks on macroeconomic systems. 

Adaptation frameworks help identify pathways toward climate-resilient societies by assessing risks and identifying trade-offs and synergies between mitigation and adaptation strategies. By better accounting for the costs of climate impacts on mitigation options (e.g. energy and land-use systems), as well as on people and the wider economy, the benefits of mitigation and necessary investments in adaptation can be assessed. Importantly, the work also integrates gender and socioeconomic dimensions to help ensure policies are inclusive and just.  

SPARCCLE supports the development of climate adaptation strategies by combining:

• Probabilistic climate impacts assessment and stress-test scenarios to show how Europe might be affected under different climate futures, highlighting where adaptation can reduce risks even under deep uncertainty.

• Improved insights into socioeconomic differences and multidimensional vulnerabilities, informed by empirical assessments using machine learning, Earth observation and econometric methods.

• The development of sector-specific adaptation pathways for energy, health, flooding and forestry sectors.

Insights on adaptation strategies will be developed across different levels and dimensions. Most of the models use detailed spatial data, which means that in most cases, results will be available at NUTS-2/3 and national levels.

From these results, sectoral insights – mainly in energy, finance, land and health – will be assessed and, where appropriate, generalised to EU-wide and macro-regional levels.

SPARCCLE aims to support strategies that consider both mitigation and adaptation, avoiding strong negative trade-offs between them or across sectors. “Mal-adaptation” – for example, air conditioning – aids adaptation and reduces heat-stress but works against efforts to reduce emissions due to increased energy use.  

The project will also assess different mitigation pathways (such as EUSABCC “iconic pathways”) to understand where shared resilience exists and where risk to climate impacts vary across regions and sectors. For instance, over-reliance on land-based solutions like afforestation could put EU climate goals at risk if droughts or wildfire increase. However, determining sustainable and climate-resilient levels of biomass production and afforestation can provide a reliable and valuable means of reducing emissions. 

In addition, the project will analyse the vulnerability of Europe’s population to climate hazards, considering key factors such as age, gender and education. This will provide new multidimensional information to help design better vulnerability and risk reduction measures. 

Thus, SPARCCLE’s integrated assessment frameworks enable the quantification of synergies and trade-offs both within and across economic sectors and regions in Europe, supporting more informed and balanced climate-resilient strategies. 

SPARCCLE will produce two key reports aimed and policy and decision-makers:

• Europe under Stress – will explore the stress-test scenarios to assess Europe’s resilience to exceptional yet plausible climate-related events.

• EU Roadmap – will outline strategic pathways towards a climate-resilient and just Europe. It will bring together findings from SPARCCLE’s assessments to provide policymakers with actionable steps to enhance resilience, reduce vulnerabilities, and align with EU climate mitigation and adaptation goals. The roadmap will aim to highlight synergies between mitigation and adaptation actions, ensuring more cohesive and effective climate action.

SPARCCLE will also support decision-making through online tools like the SPARCCLE-Explorer and EU Scoreboard, providing granular, data-driven and interactive insights into climate risks, impacts, and socio-economic vulnerabilities. These tools are designed to facilitate action at regional (NUTS-3), national, and EU levels, helping ensure policies contribute to the EU Green Deal and climate neutrality targets.