Local climate change projections
We design tools to simulate expected changes in future climate and assess how they may affect us through risk and vulnerability analysis.
About the project
Distender – Strategies for mitigation and adaptation to climate change risks – is a project financed by the European Union that seeks to create a methodological framework to guide the integration of climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies through participatory approaches, so that the integrated strategies obtained as a final result respond to the impacts and risks of climate change (CC). This is supported by quantitative and qualitative analyses that facilitate the understanding of the interactions, synergies and trade-offs between climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies.
An innovative project
The project is informed by holistic approaches to mitigation and adaptation that are tailored to the context-specific situation of each case study, which has required a flexible and participatory planning process that ensures legitimate and effective action by the most relevant stakeholders. DISTENDER will develop a set of qualitative and quantitative socio-economic and climate scenarios from which multiple relevant factors will be derived, which through a participatory process will be integrated into the project from the ground up, paying special attention to locally relevant factors, using information from the Shared Socio-Economic Pathways (SSP) and Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP) of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report.
A set of cross-sectoral and multi-scale impact assessment modeling tools will be developed to analyze the complex interactions in multiple sectors, including an economic evaluation framework. The economic impact of different efforts will be analyzed, including the settlement of damage claims and how sectoral activity patterns change under different scenarios taking into account spillover and cascading effects.
It is an innovative project combining three key concepts: cross-scale, integration/harmonization and robustness testing. DISTENDER will follow a pragmatic approach by applying methodologies and tools in a series of European case studies (six main and five follow-on case studies) that reflect a representative sample of the challenges posed by climate change adaptation and mitigation. The knowledge generated by DISTENDER will be made available through a Decision Support System (DSS) that will include guidelines, manuals, user-friendly tools and experiences from the application of the case studies.
Funded by
Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge through grants to third-sector entities or non-governmental organizations that carry out activities of general interest considered to be of social interest in the field of scientific and technical research and environmental protection under state jurisdiction. This research has been funded by the Ministry for the Ecological Transition and the Demographic Challenge but does not express its opinion.
