After 40 months of intensive work, and notwithstanding the need to reframe some of the final face-to-face work due to the emergence of COVID-19, the project completed all its tasks with satisfactory results.
The main achievements can be summarized as follows:
- Downscaled projections of CC risks for 12 EU islands (sea level rise, flooding, beach reduction, seagrass evolution, fire danger, etc.), under low and high impact scenarios and three time horizons: a baseline period (1965-2005), mid-century (2046-2065) and end of century (2081-2100).
- An iterative risk assessment of CC impacts that enable to compare islands, and monitor vulnerability-exposure.
- The estimation of the socio-economic impacts of CC for the islands, through the tailored calibration of two applied macroeconomic models, and integrating output from non-market economic valuation.
- The co-assessment with local stakeholders of policy adaptation pathways that are framed by the geographical, socio-economic conditions of each island, and the future CC scenarios.
To achieve these results, a dynamic work-flow process involving feeding information for successive stages was implemented. First, a sector-specific analysis was undertaken pivoting around the concept of Climate Change Impact Chain. Second, the climatic projections were used as inputs to a range of diverse evaluation approaches to estimate direct economic impacts on the four Blue Economy sectors. Third, the estimated changes in energy consumption, tourism flows and infrastructures have been used as inputs to assess the effects on other 14 sectors, GDP, investment, and employment. A participatory process involving local stakeholders allowed to produce precise and adapted information in all stages, taking into account the relationship between CC scenarios, biophysical impacts, and each island’s specificities. Thus, the proposed adaptation pathways address the specific limits and obstacles that constrain their avenue to become more resilient territories.
Effective dissemination and exploitation was crucial for the success of the action. The work package of Communication and Dissemination actively joined all the research stages of the project and implemented several tools and channels to target regional stakeholders, previously segmented in each island. A set of key exploitable results (KER) were identified, and transformed into 12 harmonised dissemination resources for each island to ensure their usability and comparative potential. The Regional Exchange Information System (REIS) platform embedding the Adaptation Support Tool for Islands was identified as the 13th and principal KER, which integrates all the knowledge of the project in a user-friendly way for islands' climate change policy formulation and comparison. The REIS platform aims to become a permanent facility for policy design and climate change information exchange between islands, and its long run maintenance will be supported by the leadership of Institute TiDES-ULPGC.
