Scope.

The Mediterranean ecosystem, including climate, environment, and humans, is a nexus of complex feedbacks and interactions between remote and local drivers, which, in turn, are strongly affected by both natural variability and anthropogenic climate change. PREVENT will bring together experts in different disciplines and geographical regions for a comprehensive study of impact-relevant climate extremes in the Mediterranean with the ultimate goal to facilitate short- to medium-term adaptation decision-making thanks to improve seasonal and decadal predictions in a changing climate.
Our research concept is to start from the basics of defining high-impact events and case studies to understanding the local and remote causal drivers of summer hot and dry extremes in the Mediterranean region in the context of a changing climate. We will evaluate how well represented/captured those causal drivers are by state-of-the-art seasonal to decadal models. We will then improve this representation in two different stages:using different post-processing methods, including statistical and dynamical downscaling and bias correction but also at the pre-processing stage trying to improve the input data that feed those climate models.
Our improved data on Mediterranean extremes will then be used as input to impact models of different sectors, including ecosystems management (e.g., wildfire risk), hydrological and water resources management, agriculture, human health, tourism, and insurance industries. This outcome will then contribute to the design of adaptation measures for citizens, stakeholders, and policymakers, using a decision-making under deep uncertainty methods combined with participative bottom-up approaches (WP6). At the end of the project, we aim in addressing the specific climate-related challenges and societal needs of the broader Euro-Mediterranean, contributing to more resilient societies and ecosystems.