FOL members lead an international event on Climate Risk Assessments

FOL members Elena Ojea and Juan Bueno organised and led the “Climate Risk Assessment scoping event” of FutureMARES, held online during the days of 17th and 18th February. This event was marked in red in the calendar of the European project as the starting point of activities related to the Work-Package 5. The main goal of this work-package is integrating ecological and social research to identify the most at risk marine ecosystem services and dependent livelihoods across the different case studies (“storylines“) of the project. Elena Ojea and Juan Bueno coordinate the different tasks of this work-package together with Ana Ruiz (IMEDEA-CSIC) and Clement Garcia (CEFAS), who also organized the event.

The event counted with the participation of around 40 European and American researchers from 16 institutions. These researchers represented more than 30 storylines sharing the same objective: estimating the climate risk posed by climate change in their areas of study, and analysing how Nature-Based-Solutions (e.g., sustainable harvesting or marine protected areas) could help mitigating these risks. One specific objective of the event was presenting a common methodology to be applied by the different storylines, in order to obtain comparable results and construct a common Work-package perspective: a real challenge given the wide diversity of environments and social scenarios considered in the project. The event agenda counted with presentations, discussions and online activities where all the participants shared ideas and tried to apply an homogeneous method of classification of risk factors.

The work of these storylines will continue over the next two years to perform their ecological risk assessments, period after which the social aspects of their research will be ensemble to estimate the risk of the entire social-ecological system. One of the most expected final outputs of FutureMARES will be an online tool for the estimation of the climate-risk of social-ecological systems, of great interest in the field of decision making.