Facing the challenges of climate change adaptation, TRANS-ADAPT aims to analyse and evaluate the multiple use of flood alleviation schemes with respect to social transformation in communities exposed to flood hazards. The overall goals are (1) to identify indicators and parameters necessary for strategies to increase societal resilience, (2) to analyse the institutional settings needed for societal transformation, and (3) to assess the perspectives of changing divisions of responsibilities between public and private actors necessary to arrive at more resilient societies. Yet each risk mitigation measure is built on a narrative of exchanges and relations between people and therefore may condition the outputs. As such, governance is done by people interacting and defining risk mitigation measures as well as climate change adaptation are therefore simultaneously both outcomes of, and productive to, public and private responsibilities. Building off current knowledge this project will focus on different dimensions of adaptation and mitigation strategies based on social, economic and institutional incentives and settings, centring on the linkages between these different dimensions and complementing existing flood risk governance arrangements. The policy dimension of adaptation, predominantly decisions on the societal admissible level of vulnerability and risk, will be evaluated by a human-environment interaction approach using multiple methods and the assessment of social capacities of stakeholders across scales. As such, the challenges of adaptation to flood risk will be tackled by converting scientific frameworks into practical assessment and policy advice. In addressing the relationship between these dimensions of adaptation on different temporal and spatial scales, this project is both scientifically innovative and policy relevant, thereby supporting climate policy needs in Europe towards a concept of risk governance.

The tipping of some components of the Earth system to new states as a result of global change has become a major concern. The project assumes that tipping points exist in the hydrological cycle and that they could be the cause of the durable hydrological changes observed in part of West Africa, as a result of the 1970-80 severe drought and land use changes. A modeling framework will be specifically developed to verify whether shifts have occurred in the past decades over this region, where and when, whether they could occur in the future in a warmer and more populated world, and what would be their consequences on water resources and hydrological risks. The project promotes an innovative vision of hydrology in which ruptures can play a key role, which could lead to modify the design of adaptation strategies to global change.

Co-cli-serv explores novel ways to transform climate science into action-oriented place-based climate services to engage, enable and empower local communities, knowledge brokers and scientists to act locally. It seeks to identify future information needs and the nature of the climate science needed to address the local communities’ concerns, aspirations and goals in view of climate variability and climate change. It will develop a novel approach for co-constructing climate services to support local planning and adaptation decision-making. Co-cli-serv will establish a collaborative relationship between climate science and local communities in five representative case studies across NW Europe; (i) Bergen in Norway; (ii) Brest and the Golfe du Morbihan in France, Dordrecht and surrounding area in the Netherlands, and communities along the Wadden Sea in Germany. The project will engage a wide spectrum of actors from local government, to the tourism industry, to local NGOs and to professional associations. It aims to proactively connect climate science with local communities, using local narratives as an entry point, and vision planning and adaptive pathways as co-construction locus. Central in Co-cli-serv's approach is its focus on narratives of change as a localisation device. Narratives give meaning to facts and scientific calculations. They turn ‘matters of fact’ into ‘matters of concern’. Grounded in such narratives, vision-based scenarios will be developed by employing an incremental and community-led strategy, enabling the identification of current AND future knowledge needs. The project will experiment with art–science–policy integration in the case studies. Building on existing climate science and practices, Co-cli-serv will instigate and sustain community dialogues to co-construct place-based climate services. It takes systematic critical reflection on knowledge quality as the central activity in interfacing climate science and local governance.

Rooting its work in the Arctic, with and for Arctic communities, the "Sense Making, Place attachment, and Extended networks, as sources of Resilience in the Arctic" (SeMPER-Arctic) project consortium will be collecting local stories of changes, shocks, upheavals and their aftermaths. The SeMPER-Arctic team members will adopt these narratives as local, and localized, anchoring devices for resilience analysis. Members of three Arctic communities have been involved in the preparation of SeMPER-Arctic and the consortium has committed to work with and for these communities. Their stories of individual and collective ability to fare through shocks, threat, unusually fast changes, will constitute SeMPER-Arctic central corpus. Two broad categories of narratives that are external to communities have been identified as priority area of enquiry : environmental science and public policy and regional development. The consortium will analyse how these narratives interact with local narrative of resilience. This will allow for the assessment of their impacts. The interdisciplinary framework of resilience interpretations will be used to examine the resilience narratives in the light of the dimension that are salient for the members of arctic communities. The consortium will be in a position to take stock of the lessons learned in its three pilot implementation sites. It will have developed a narrative centred, locally rooted, place-based understanding of resilience within arctic communities. This understanding is key for developing tools and strategies to increasing community resilience in other communities. These results will call for sharing the lessons learned with regional planners and policy-makers. The consortium will thus be contributing to the knowledge base on global environmental change through respectful, non-prejudiced, enquiry of what it means to be a resilient arctic community in the 21st century. The results of this analysis will be translated into options for actions, at the local, regional, national and circumpolar levels.

Topic of this project is “Fake News in the Age of Democracy”. In the current atmosphere in the EU, where populist movements are on the rise and fake news often influence the democratic decisions in many countries, we need to speak more about what democracy means and what the real democratic dialogue looks like. What used to seem so obvious for many years (democratic decisions should be based on valid facts and public dialogue), needs to be reminded aloud again.Together with our pupils (14 - 20 years) from four European countries (Czech Republic, Netherlands, Slovenia and Germany) we will concentrate on various aspects of democracy and media literacy. We will organize four international meetings for 140 pupils from four different countries, another 1000 students will be involved in project activities on schoolsOur aim is to light up this democratic mindset and reflect it with our students in an interactive, creative and fruitful way. We will reflect specific historical experience of each participant country but also our current life, school, family and society. We want our pupils to be able to feel responsibility for their own choices, to be able to get relevant information and to be resilient against manipulation.Specific results of the project:- 4 international exchanges of groups of pupils from all partner schools (priority International cooperation)- online communication and video channel with short videos prepared by small international groups in English during the meetings reflecting our main topics (priority ICT - new technologies - digital competences)- every school prepares at least 2 project days focusing on media literacy (dealing with fake news) and democracy (priority EU Citizenship, EU awareness and Democracy)This project is prepared by an existing international partnership of schools, however we will involve new teachers from our schools and we will also focus on sharing our methods and experiences in the field of media literacy and civic education.