Overarching objective of CLARITY is to demonstrate the benefit of climate services for climate proofing of vulnerable large-scale investments such as urban infrastructure. According to the DoA, the six underlying measurable objectives of the CLARITY project are:
- O1 Develop an integrated Climate Services Information System (CSIS) for resilience assessment and climate-proofing of the large scale infrastructure projects
- “The CLARITY CSIS will support the infrastructure planners and managers, in the task of climate-proofing large scale infrastructure projects. CSIS will be designed as an eco-system of cloud-based climate services and provide support for: Identification of project climate sensitivity (extensible to new project types); evaluation of the exposure to climate hazards under future climate conditions (anywhere in EU); assessment of vulnerability to observed and future climate (extensible to new project types); risk assessment in an all-hazard approach context; identification and appraisal of the adaptation options; development of adaptation action plans.”
- O2 Maximize the re-use and tailoring of existing data, technologies and services
- “CSIS will integrate and customize core climate services such as Copernicus Climate Change Services (C3S), in order to provide the basis data on current climate and land cover (e.g. ECA&D, E-OBS, Copernicus Land Monitoring Services), downscaling services (e.g. SUDPLAN, EURO-CORDEX), seasonal (ECMW IFS, NCEP CFS) and long term (IPCC) climate predictions. It will enrich the climate projections with domain specific information such as population density, population structure, building substance and land use, in order to answer the needs of the end-users that are involved in CLARITY demonstrators and other stakeholders (see O3). The basic data set will be available for the whole EU (e.g. based on INSPIRE data), and the users will have a possibility to improve the service by providing additional or more accurate data for their region/location. CLARITY inherits from projects in the areas of Climate change and Urban planning, disaster preparedness as well as Future Internet technology.
- O3 Co-design and Co-develop with suppliers, purveyors and end-users
- “Climate service development will be facilitated by a bottom up approach with integral stakeholder and end user involvement (user-centred design). CLARITY climate services will be co-developed by city planners, consultants and providers of the climate intelligence and end-users from urban and regional planning as well as infrastructure providers. In an AGILE and iterative process, the CLARITY development team shall identify and close concrete gaps between policy and its implementation, address societal acceptance, as well as the operational and exploitation requirements.“
- O4 Demonstrate and validate the added value, flexibility and adjustability of the CLARITY Services to national and/or regional differences
- “CLARITY will implement four representative demonstration cases to validate concepts, methods and software and to measure the added value of CLARITY for the users within and outside consortium. The demonstration cases will focus on climate-proofing of large scale investments with appropriate geographical, climatic, and investment type representation. The demonstrations will lean on existing climate-proofing efforts in the four locations and enlarge the knowledge base. With the help of the CLARITY community (see O5), we will also assess and maximize the result transferability to other sites and assure that the services are flexible enough to address new adaptation measures and risk reduction options under differing conditions.”
- O5 Create a CLARITY community
- “To be able to scale up the results of the project we will create and manage a CLARITY community encompassing the different stakeholder categories (see O3). The community will grow throughout the project to prepare the uptake and become a core of future sustainability. Communication will aim at creating awareness and interest for CLARITY results and activities and interest to join the CLARITY Community; dissemination activities will aim at recruiting members into the CLARITY Community and engaging with members to obtain feedback.”
- O6 Make fit for Exploitation
- “CLARITY aims to assure that the project results are turned into an operational and sustainable Climate Services deep-seated in the existing climate change adaption data and tools landscape. This will be achieved by: (1) the development and advertising of an inclusive business plan that allows the third party developers and service providers to benefit from use of the CLARITY Services; (2) provision of the documentation and feature videos for potential users and integrators; (3) technical compatibility of CLARITY with established data and service infrastructures such as existing CC adaptation platforms and research infrastructures; and (4) development of a mature software based climate service that will reach the pre-operative phase by the end of the second project year, that supports the exploitation strategy and addresses the operational and organisational needs of the target users.”