INTEGRATED RESEARCH INFRASTRUCTURE SERVICES FOR CLIMATE CHANGE RISKS (IRISCC)

Research infrastructures provide critical services that advance the generation of knowledge and access to cutting-edge research facilities/installations/equipment and research data, a pre-requisite for scientific excellence in Europe. Addressing climate change related risks requires an integrated approach to risks that goes beyond the current service provision of European and national research infrastructures (RIs). Existing RIs provide discipline or domain-oriented (e.g., atmosphere, marine, land system, society) or thematically/methodologically oriented (e.g. carbon cycle, climate models) services that cover aspects of climate change risks but not the entire knowledge production chain. Integrated Research Infrastructure Services for Climate Change Risks (IRISCC) aims to enable societal actors to navigate in a multi-hazard and multi-risk economic-societal-ecological operational reality. One main ambition of IRISCC is to provide scientific and knowledge-based services that support societal adaptation to climate change of impacted sectors of EU regions and cities, economy, health, and wellbeing and consequently for the restoration of Europe's ecosystems and biodiversity with sustainable management of natural resources, food security and a clean and healthy environment. IRISCC will respond to the highly complex and urgent socio-economic, environmental and energy, digitalisation, and security challenges that Europe faces, through inter- and transdisciplinary approaches for the provision of strategic, challenge-driven, customised services to accelerate the pace of the research cycle and deliver a rapid-transition of scientific knowledge to innovative solutions. The overarching mission of IRISCC is to support and facilitate in-depth knowledge production on Climate Change Risks through its activities, particularly: 1) to understand the interlinked processes behind climate change risks (systems, hazards, exposure, and vulnerability); and 2) to better predict, mitigate, and adapt to these risks impacting human-, production-, and natural-systems, now and in the future. IRISCC aims to engage all the relevant disciplines and stakeholders by inter- and trans-disciplinary approach to knowledge creation. The IRISCC project strives to provide scientific and knowledge-based co-designed services in an innovative manner and will interlink and integrate RIs’ services to understand interdisciplinary research aspects of climatology, ecology, biodiversity, health, agronomy, forestry, economics, and social sciences. IRISCC will offer transnational and virtual access to research, innovation, training, and digital services (including data, analytical tools, models, virtual research environments (VREs), computational capacity) from state-of-the-art observatories, experimental facilities, modelling, and data infrastructures.