Strengthening Europe’s resilience to climate risks

SPARCCLE is a Horizon Europe consortium project co-developing modelling tools with policymakers, scientists, and civil society to support better decision-making in reducing climate risks and strengthening Europe’s societal and economic resilience. By co-designing stress test scenarios with key stakeholders, the project explores high-impact, plausible climate risks, helping to understand Europe’s vulnerability to extreme climate-related disruptions.

By delivering detailed socioeconomic projections, the project seeks to improve understanding of how societal development interacts with climate impacts, while also examining the synergies and trade-offs between mitigation and adaptation measures. Through co-creation with public and private stakeholders, the project ensures its outputs directly inform policy and decision-making around resilience planning.

Our contribution to the project lies in strengthening the assessment of climate-related impacts and adaptation capacities. We lead the integration of CLIMADA (a risk modelling tool that translates climate hazards such as floods, heatwaves, or crop failures) into estimates of potential damages.

By coupling CLIMADA with MESMER (a climate emulator that produces probabilistic scenarios of future climate extremes) we build a more realistic and comprehensive assessment of climate risks – including low-probability, high-impact events. We also incorporate how and to what extent societies and sectors can respond to climate impacts, and develop adaptation pathways – sequences of adaptation measures – that incorporate the physical and socioeconomic limits to adaptation. This includes assessing how climate-related shocks can affect public and private finances, such as impacts on infrastructure and economic stability. These insights are then fed back into Integrated Assessment Models.

This work contributes to a more robust understanding of the financial and socioeconomic consequences of climate change and supports the design of effective, equitable, and forward-looking adaptation strategies across Europe.