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.

Climate change scenarios obtained by models foresee changes in the availability of water resources that make it necessary to improve their management, especially for groundwater, as they are one of the most important, but at the same time most vulnerable, sources of fresh water on the planet. Groundwater governance can be defined as "the process by which groundwater is managed through the application of elements such as accountability, participation, availability of information, transparency, customs and policy." The manner in which this governance is carried out can have direct implications for the status of groundwater, both qualitatively and quantitatively, hence its importance when analysing the status of an aquifer or groundwater body. The objective of this contribution is to present GTool, a brand new digital and user-driven tool developed in the framework of the EU PRIMA project GOTHAM, which aims at establishing a new groundwater governance model based on a bottom-up approach. One of the modules that GTool integrates, called “Groundwater Response Module”, has been designed with the objective of forecasting the most probable groundwater body status according to a selection of variables. The input data used to assess the current and expected status of the aquifer comprises groundwater quality trends, prediction of scarcity and drought indexes, the potential use of non-conventional water resources (reused water), the increase of available resources by the implementation of managed aquifer recharge (MAR) techniques, potential groundwater quality restoration by means of remediation techniques, and current groundwater governance. This methodology has been applied in Campo de Dalías-Sierra de Gádor groundwater body (Southern Spain), which is characterised by large groundwater abstraction (mainly for the irrigation of greenhouses crops), steep and lasting drops of groundwater levels and subsequent groundwater quality degradation by seawater intrusion and salinity increase. Results show that, despite the good groundwater governance and high MAR and non-conventional water resources potential currently existing in the area, Campo de Dalías-Sierra de Gádor groundwater body is expected to have a ‘bad’ status in the medium term, principally due to the forecasted scarcity and drought indexes and, secondarily, upward trends regarding salinity (electrical conductivity, chloride) and nitrate contents.