Climate Alert Smart System for Sustainable Water and Agriculture − CLIMALERT

Outline

The vulnerability of sensitive European regions to impacts of hydro-meteorological disasters has increased dramatically over the past few decades with impacts on food production, food distribution infrastructure, livelihood assets and human health in both rural and urban areas to face Global Climate Change. Meantime, climate services have started to be developed to further predict the impacts of climate variability and to apply climate predictions in different sectors, such as agriculture and water. However, connections between climate information users and providers are still weak or non-existent.

The CLIMALERT project emerges to provide climate information in a format that prospective users find it easy to understand and/or incorporate into decision-making. Main goals are:

i) potentiate the link between climate research, water resources, and the agriculture sector to assist in management of natural resources, enhance agricultural livelihoods and reduce underlying causes of vulnerability,

ii) advance the techniques and tools currently used to incorporate weather and climate information at different time scales into risk assessment and decision-making in agriculture (management practices), and

iii) contribute to a global framework to improve the transfer and exchange of information on future or near-term climate scenarios to help decision-makers in applying adaptation and mitigation strategies.

A multidisciplinary team with experts in climate science, engineering, social and economic sciences, and ecology will closely cooperate with relevant stakeholders to co-develop innovative tools (software and apps) to alert quickly for proper risk management and to predict and mitigate impacts due to extreme climate events. This will be done by implementing new long-term preparedness plans of actions to reduce the risks and vulnerabilities for the agriculture and water management sectors, providing economically valuable services and long-term benefits to farmers and society.