This study presents the ClimEmpower framework, a user-driven approach to enhancing climate resilience across five climate-vulnerable regions in Southern Europe: Costa del Sol (Spain), Central Greece, the Troodos Mountains (Cyprus), Osijek-Baranja County (Croatia), and Sicily (Italy). The project employs a region-specific methodology that integrates climate risk assessments, stakeholder engagement through Communities of Practice (CoPs), and the development of innovative climate services tailored to local needs. These regions, characterized by unique environmental and socio-economic vulnerabilities, face shared hazards such as droughts, heatwaves, and floods, alongside region-specific challenges like salinization and biodiversity loss. ClimEmpower identifies critical gaps in high-resolution data, cross-sectoral collaboration, and capacity-building efforts, underscoring barriers to effective adaptation. This work aims to provide a foundational resource, offering a comprehensive overview of the current situation, including needs, gaps, priorities, and expectations across the target regions. By establishing this baseline, it facilitates future research and comparative analyses, contributing to the development of robust, region-specific resilience strategies. The ClimEmpower framework offers scalable and replicable solutions aligned with the European Green Deal’s climate resilience goals, advancing adaptation planning and providing actionable insights for broader European initiatives.

As climate change is an urgent global threat, the EU’s Green Deal aims to make Europe climate-neutral by 2050, while ensuring fair and sustainable implementation. Achieving this goal requires both mitigation and adaptation measures, with a focus on understanding the interactions and trade-offs between them. One major shortcoming of current modelling approaches is the omission of interactions between domain-specific models from various fields, as they often differ in their modelling approaches. However, this is crucial in understanding the full impact of mitigation and adaptation measures, as their impact cascades into many sectors.Among other demonstrator regions within the KNOWING project, future scenarios for the city of Tallinn (Estonia), incorporating traffic related mitigation and heat related adaptation measures are modelled in close exchange with city representatives. The traffic and transport sectors are simulated with a state-of-the-art multimodal tour-based transport model, which aims to depict passenger and freight transport activities and traffic flows for a typical workday for the status-quo, 2030, 2040 and 2050. To understand the microclimate as well as to identify heat stress hotspots of the city, the state-of-the-art model PALM-4U is used. A hot summer day with boundary conditions from a mesoscale climate model is applied to the status-quo city as well as a Tallinn of 2030, 2040 and 2050.To capture the impact of the transport scenarios to the microclimate simulationstransport infrastructure changes have been implemented as land-use changes within PALM-4U. Desealing of street lanes as well as parking lots and added street greenery within the future scenarios is applied in PALM-4U based on the modelled changes in transport infrastructure. Vice versa, the transport model is also impacted by the microclimate model, as street canyons with high heat stress during the daytime might be avoided by cyclists and pedestrians alike.This results effectively in a quantification of exposure for pedestrians and cyclists for each link, allowing to define additional weights for these passages within the transport model. These weights account for a disutility for pedestrians and cyclists within destination choice, mode choice and route assignment procedures. As the typical working day traffic is simulated for the entire year and the heat day simulation is only valid for some summer days, the weights derived from microclimate model are only applied as statistically appropriate for each future scenario.Many further interactions and linkages between the two modelling approaches are still omitted, however the possible enhancement of the transport model with heat stress information from the climate model lays an important foundation for further understanding the intersectoral impacts of climate adaptation measures and adds additional value in transit-orientated development.

At a time when reducing emissions is becoming more urgent, and when climate impacts are intensifying, European regions and cities are grappling with the double challenge of planning climate mitigation and adaptation. Project KNOWING investigated how state-of-the-art scientific methods can be leveraged to assist the design of future pathways that integrate mitigation and adaptation interventions in a rational way. We present here the results of this investigation for the city of Naples, focusing on the emerging climate risks: from compound pluvial and coastal flooding, and from heatwaves. Starting from a process of stakeholder consultation and from the local SECAP plans, we defined a set of desirable mitigation and adaptation interventions. This were then simulated through specific domain models, including models of regional and urban climate, marine waves, compound flooding, health impacts, transport, energy supply and energy demand, behaviour. In addition, a model of system dynamics was implemented, to represent the key local processes that are relevant for climate impacts, mitigation and adaptation. Based on the results of both modelling approaches, we designed a local pathway of integrated mitigation and adaptation, which can serve to inform planning in the near and distant future.

The intensification of the climate crisis is making heat an emerging risk for Tallinn, increasing the pressure on the city to adapt to altered climate conditions while accommodating urban growth and planned development. This study therefore assesses how planned urban growth can be combined with necessary nature-based adaptation measures to reduce heat exposure and shape Tallinn’s future city-wide microclimate. Future urban configurations were developed in close collaboration with city representatives and translated into a reference case and three successive scenarios for 2030, 2040, and 2050. %As detailed planning information beyond 2035 is limited, the status-quo simulation was used to identify thermally stressed locations for targeted adaptation measures, including unsealing, street greening, renaturalization, and tree planting. Building retrofitting and enhanced insulation of newly constructed buildings were also represented. The scenarios were simulated with the PALM model system for a hot summer period using identical meteorological forcing derived from WRF simulations. The analysis evaluates maximum and minimum 2 m air temperature, the Universal Thermal Climate Index (UTCI), and rank-based heat hotspots. Results show that heat-adapted urban growth can locally reduce daytime heat exposure through shading and vegetation, but may also introduce warming where thermally moderating surfaces are replaced by sealed and built-up land. The strongest adaptation signal occurs for nighttime minimum temperature, particularly where unsealing and greening are implemented at larger scale and targeted to existing hotspots. City-wide median changes remain modest, while hotspot-specific reductions become evident in the 2040 and 2050 scenarios. By applying city-scale PALM modelling to a northern coastal city where heat-adaptation pathways remain comparatively underexplored, the study demonstrates how modelling can support staged planning strategies that combine urban growth with climate-sensitive design and targeted nature-based adaptation.

The impact of human-induced climate change on our living conditions is becoming increasingly evident, causing damage to infrastructure and posing a threat to human lives. The challenges urban environments face, home to approximately two-thirds of the global population, extend beyond rising temperatures to include altered precipitation patterns. Cities are particularly vulnerable due to their predominantly sealed surfaces, which exacerbate climate change effects such as increased heat and intensified rainfall events, in contrast to natural areas with different characteristics like albedo, heat capacity, and infiltration rates.The KNOWING project focuses on two significant climate impacts: flooding (both fluvial and pluvial) and its effects on infrastructure and heat and its impact on public health. Granollers City serves as an urban case study for flood and heatwave analysis. Two models, PALM-4U [1] and ICM-Infoworks [2], are employed to evaluate potential adaptation measures for current and future climate change impacts.PALM-4U, an urban climate model, is used to quantify the impact of greening initiatives on urban heat load. ICM-Infoworks assesses adaptation measures to mitigate pluvial and fluvial flooding. Both models rely on land use data, and the proposed changes to address heat (such as greening and unsealing) often coincide with those aimed at reducing flooding (like retention areas and unsealing).The PALM-4U model considers interventions such as increased tree cover, new recreational parks, river renaturalization, and building-related measures like green roofs and retrofitting. These interventions, which lead to increased unsealing and improved infiltration, also help reduce flood risk and can be incorporated into the ICM-Infoworks model to quantify their impact on flooding. By evaluating the effectiveness of the same interventions using two different models and addressing two distinct climate risks (heat and flooding), this approach allows for a comprehensive assessment of climate change adaptation strategies.Acknowledgements KNOWING has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under grant agreement n° 101056841.[1] Maronga, B., Banzhaf, S., Burmeister, C., Esch, T., Forkel, R., Fröhlich, D., Fuka, V., Gehrke, K. F., Geletič, J., Giersch, S., Gronemeier, T., Groß, G., Heldens, W., Hellsten, A., Hoffmann, F., Inagaki, A., Kadasch, E., Kanani-Sühring, F., Ketelsen, K., Khan, B. A., Knigge, C., Knoop, H., Krč, P., Kurppa, M., Maamari, H., Matzarakis, A., Mauder, M., Pallasch, M., Pavlik, D., Pfafferott, J., Resler, J., Rissmann, S., Russo, E., Salim, M., Schrempf, M., Schwenkel, J., Seckmeyer, G., Schubert, S., Sühring, M., von Tils, R., Vollmer, L., Ward, S., Witha, B., Wurps, H., Zeidler, J., and Raasch, S. (2020). Overview of the PALM model system 6.0, Geosci. Model Dev., 13, 1335–1372. https://doi.org/10.5194/gmd-13-1335-2020[2] Mohd Sidek, Lariyah & Jaafar, Aminah Shakirah & Majid, Wan & Basri, Hidayah & Marufuzzaman, Mohammad & Fared, Muzad & Moon, Wei. (2021). High-Resolution Hydrological-Hydraulic Modeling of Urban Floods Using InfoWorks ICM. Sustainability. 13. 10259. 10.3390/su131810259.

Extreme heat waves and high temperatures have tremendous impacts on human health and consequently the health system. Over the past years, the increasing summer heat has brought both, the population and the healthcare organisations to their limits. As care and emergency organizations are already experiencing challenging conditions during holiday season due to limited personnel resources, this situation is intensified due to rising heat that causes increased care needs and emergency operations. From a patient’s perspective, vulnerable groups, such as children, the elderly, and people with chronic and mental illnesses, are particularly affected. Symptoms can range from heat stress and cardiovascular problems to sudden death. While this places a particular burden on individual people, it also poses major challenges for health and care systems.The research projects HeatProtect1and PARAHSOHL2, aim at supporting health care organisations through identifying the most promising adaptation measures and possible digital tools. Therefore, sector specific challenges of the health system in Austria caused by extreme heat are addressed. Since heat days and tropical nights became more severe in recent decades and are continuously increasing, heat is perceived as emerging climate risk in Austria.Within the projects, meteorological, climatological and health expertise is combined through the participating organisations. Further, data from all areas are combined and assessed applying qualitative and quantitative methods to support the health sector in dealing with future heat events. Health-related heat indicators are used to quantify impacts under future global warming levels, while a regression model is applied to estimate the associated effects on hospitalizations.To identify the risks and vulnerabilities associated with heat as hazard for individual target groups, the concept of climate impact chains is used. This approach helps to identify key points where action can reduce the vulnerability of the organisations and therefore the risk of extreme heat and improve resilience in the health system. Through an interdisciplinary research approach, the projects enable bridging gaps between the complexity of climate science and the demanding day-to-day challenges of the health system. 1https://projekte.ffg.at/projekt/48475102 https://projekte.ffg.at/projekt/5125189