Seeking to improve future governance and access to data for climate emergencies

On the 3rd of March, 2023 the first ‘Real World Lab’ of the DIRECTED Project took place, led by the Capital Region of Denmark and the Danish Technical University (DTU) in Hillerød, Denmark. The Lab brought together practitioners, primarily from local municipalities and emergency services in the region, for the first of a range of meetings over the next four years. The meetings will assist in their ability to improve preparation and response to extreme climate events by improving governance systems and providing tailored information to the many actors involved in both emergency response efforts and long-term climate adaptation. The DIRECTED partnership seeks to develop a clear and manageable climate emergencies governance system and bring together interoperable disaster forecasting, climate change risk assessment and adaptation planning tools into one easily usable ‘Data Fabric’ that will enable the necessary information getting into the hands of multiple local stakeholders. Participants in the Lab will collaborate to share knowledge on dealing with and planning for extreme climate events, and to co-produce and test a range of decision support tools.

The Lab is in response to extreme events such as the 2013, Storm Bodil (also known as Storm Xavier, Sinterklaasstorm and Sven) that caused the highest wind gusts ever recorded in Denmark hitting 135 – 153 km/h on the North Atlantic Coast and killing one woman in Denmark and 19 people across Europe. It caused severe damage across the region resulting from wind damage, severe flooding and coastal storm surges. Insurance companies across Denmark, Norway, Sweden and Germany reported insured losses of €680 million.  This event and the potential for other extreme events in the future are driving the partnership to focus on how we might reduce casualties, damage and losses in the future. The ‘Real World Lab’ approach will help local authorities and first responders to better plan for extreme climate events, such as Storm Bodil and assist in the prevention, adaptation and resilience planning at municipality level.
Emilie Rønde Nielsen, Special Consultant for Mobility, Climate, Innovation & Education, at the Capital Region Denmark said “The workshop highlighted the challenges of planning and communicating in an era of climate change uncertainty, both when it comes to extreme climate events but also in terms of longer-term climate change adaptation. Thanks to the committed participants, we gained a detailed insight into the complexities of these processes, as well as an insight into the cross-sectional approach that is needed to overcome silos and enable interoperability.”

Storm ‚Bodil‘ at the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde in 2016

What is a Real World Lab?

Real World Labs create collaborative environments for learning and innovation through co-production workshops, demonstrations and training, as well as promoting multi-level collaborative risk governance am

ong actors managing disaster risk and climate adaptation. They seek to work with a range of stakeholders from all levels of governance, including representatives from government, academia, industry and civil society to understand the information needs and co-produce solutions, capturing synergies across Disaster Risk Reduction and Climate Change Adaptation, and strengthening resilience against climate change, extreme weather and multi-risk events.

Results of the First Real World Lab

The municipality officers, emergency responders, The Danish Emergency Management and Region Zealand who attended the event worked on a range of exercises enabling stakeholders to share their experiences, issues and concerns on how things had worked in the past and what they felt was needed to improve the current working systems in relation to managing extreme events. Three main themes emerged.

Citizen Responsibility

There was a desire for a better understanding and management of citizen responsibility in extreme events. For example, understanding how to prepare and behave during an event and emergency response volunteer management.

Emilie Rønde Nielsen, Special Consultant for Mobility, Climate, Innovation & Education, at the Capital Region Denmark said “The workshop highlighted the challenges of planning and communicating in an era of climate change uncertainty, both when it comes to extreme climate events but also in terms of longer-term climate change adaptation. Thanks to the committed participants, we gained a detailed insight into the complexities of these processes, as well as an insight into the cross-sectional approach that is needed to overcome silos and enable interoperability.”

Communications and Co-ordination

Broadly, it was felt that the improvements of communication systems should be a priority. Although municipalities and emergency responders are very busy and cooperation between them is going well, they expressed a clear need for higher political focus and allocation of resources. Secondly, they felt that municipalities should improve cross boundary interactions, although it appeared emergency services were more connected across boundaries. There was also a great wish for a common and shared platform for communication and data, so that all actors involved in an extreme weather event can find the same information in just one place.

Data and Simulation

Experiences were relayed on the low accuracy of some of the tools being used for flood prediction, in particular flood levels, causing an under-estimate of the water levels, and in some cases an over-estimate triggering non-essential road closures and health sector responses. Stakeholders expressed an interest in a higher alignment of data between the municipalities and emergency managements, as well as better opportunities to use each other’s measuring stations. They also wanted to know more about and how to access the types and range of tools available to assist both forecasting and adaptation planning, as well as clear national recommendations on which climate scenarios to use. Importantly, stakeholders expressed a desire to work on the simulation of emergency events, as well as work more on managed retreat options in terms of cost/benefit analysis of flood prevention measures.

The meeting ended with participants being asked who else should be invited to be involved in the DIRECTED work. The municipality and emergency responder representatives at the event suggested that national actors including the Hydro-met agency, regional actors, including health care system providers, Danish Road Directorate, dike groups, utility companies, the Homeguard, other municipalities and emergency management agencies, the police, municipality GIS experts and municipality communication staff, as well as community level emergency management volunteers and citizens involved in climate adaptation activity should be invited to participate in future events.  Clearly, this list of stakeholders shows the complexity of climate emergency management, but the DIRECTED Project hope through the management of this complexity through improving governance systems, making climate data and models more interoperable to enable local use and providing innovative data and communication through a ‘Data Fabric’, the sharing of data and information will begin to make local climate emergency management fit for the climate change challenges ahead.

For more information about the Capital Region, Denmark, Real World Lab please contact:

Emilie Rønde, Specialconsultant – emilie.roende.nielsen@regionh.dk or

Amalie Vestergaard Laursen, Consultant – amalie.laursen@regionh.dk

For any further information about the Project, please contact: info@directedproject.eu

About this Project:
[This project is an Innovation Action under the Civil Security for Society, Disaster-Resilient Societies programme of the Horizon Europe funded by the European Union. Project details and a full list of participant organisations can be found on the link: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101073978. Associate partners SEI Oxford and Oasis Hub are funded by Innovate UK and ETH Zurich is funded by The State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), Switzerland]

by Tracy Irvine, Oasis Hub Ltd

Learning to collaborate and manage increasing climate change disaster risks and climate adaptation together.

In Europe, as globally, we face an increasing frequency and intensity of climate-related extreme events caused by climate change. According to the global reinsurer, Swiss Re, in 2021 global flood events claimed over 2500 lives and caused US$80 billion in economic loss. In addition, Europe experienced the largest floods ever, as well the highest economic and insured losses for flood anywhere in the world in.

We were all shocked to see the news footage of flood damage and economic losses caused by floods in July 2021 in the Rhine Basin, Germany, where 220 people lost their lives and Euro 30 Billion of economic damage occurred in just one night, that even today, in 2023, impacts the lives of thousands of people as they recover from this disaster. It highlights how Germany, like most European countries, are unprepared for the potential scale of disasters in the future that are likely to be caused by climate change, ageing flood protection infrastructure and land-use changes. Indeed, ‘Swiss-re-institute-sigma-natcat-2022 Report’ (2022) predicts there is a long-term upward trend in climate-related disasters globally.

Figure 1. 2021 Global Economic and Flood Losses; Swiss Re Institute-sigma-natcat, 2022

Therefore, Europe needs to step up its action towards Climate-related disaster management and climate adaptation.

Funded as a Horizon Europe project by the European Union, the ‘Disaster Resilience for Extreme Climate Events providing Interoperable Data, Models, Communication and Governance (DIRECTED) Project, seeks to assist better planning and information for disaster risk assessment, forecasting, management and climate change adaptation.

We believe that improved disaster management and climate change adaptation is not just about having the most scientifically advanced information at your fingertips, but equally important is the governance and information access and flow and the ability of different actors to understand and utilise appropriate information tailored to their needs.

Figure 2. Swiss Re Institute (2022) Graph showing 10-year trends in disaster events; Swiss Re Institute-sigma-natcat, 2022

Our Mission objectives are:

Overcome silos between technical and political authorities of all levels, including organisations, sectors and disciplines by improving dialogues and communication among DRR and CCA actors and by promoting the exchange and integration of information and knowledge.

Leverage synergies, combine efforts and reduce the fragmentation within DRR and CCA domains, including addressing multi-level governance and different spatial and temporal scales.

Promote multi-risk thinking by means of a novel transdisciplinary multi-risk governance framework related to climate extremes (RISK-TANDEM) aimed at assessing, evaluating, managing and communicating multi-hazard, multi-risk issues in close collaboration with engaged stakeholders, practitioners and concerned citizens.

Build capacity and lasting real-world partnerships and collaboration between involved actors that will last beyond the project.

Exploit the power of open data and open science, improving capabilities (e.g. using a flexible Data Fabric architecture) to make use of scattered information for more effective decisions, including knowledge and tools developed within past, present and future research and innovation initiatives.

Working with local clusters of Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) and Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) specialists at the coal face in Germany, Italy, Denmark and across the Danube Region we will facilitate ‘Real World Labs’ where local and national authorities, first & second responders, climate change adaptation planners, businesses, physical and social scientists will work together in these regional hubs to identify institutional barriers and silos and improve tailored and relevant information flow to organisations working within disaster management and climate change.

Figure 3. Map of the Real World Labs – in the DIRECTED Project

We will also be demonstrating some existing scientific climate change risk assessment and adaptation tools developed previously in the science and insurance sectors and look at how the flow of this information might be made interoperable thus increasing more joined up information flows, easily useable by on-the-ground practitioners during emergencies and disaster risk planning and risk reduction processes.

One thing we know, is this will be a highly collaborative project, where the participants will need to step back, understand and collaborate with professionals from different disciplines. We think we have the team to make this happen!

In addition, we would like to converse more broadly with the disaster risk and climate adaptation professionals across Europe and beyond to bring greater understanding and knowledge exchange in the work we are doing, to achieve better and more widely applicable outputs from the Project.

And this is where YOU come in… We will be communicating through a range of social media channels about the work we are doing over the next 4 years. In particular, we have opened a DIRECTED Project Group on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/groups/14155514/ where we will talk about our findings from the Real World Labs, talk about some of the scientific disaster risk assessment, forecasting and climate change adaptation tools and how we might make them more interoperable and ask questions of DRR & CCA practitioners like yourselves, to help us think about how information needs to flow in disaster situations and more broadly co-ordinate knowledge exchange in this space.

Therefore, please do come along and join us on LinkedIn as we begin our Project:

For any further information about the Project, please contact:info@directedproject.eu

About this Project:
[This project is an Innovation Action under the Civil Security for Society, Disaster-Resilient Societies programme of the Horizon Europe funded by the European Union. Project details and a full list of participant organisations can be found on the link: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/101073978. Associate partners SEI Oxford and Oasis Hub are funded by Innovate UK and ETH Zurich is funded by The State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (SERI), Switzerland]

by Tracy Irvine, Oasis Hub Ltd