Bridging the gap between climate data and policy makers: The CLIMAAX project example

Citizens in every inhabited place on the planet are increasingly experiencing dramatic consequences of a changing climate. Within Europe the adaptation gap between the multi-hazard climate risk and the risk management capability is growing. The EU Horizon Europe project CLIMAAX (CLIMAte risk and vulnerability Assessment framework and toolboX) addresses this by providing financial, analytical and practical support to climate risk assessment community, allowing an improvement of regional Climate Risk Assessment (CRA) and management plans. In the context of the project, we have developed an inclusive and harmonised CRA framework and the toolbox for improved data access, manipulation, processing, modelling and visualisation.The four main elements of the toolbox are:1) A Handbook: the website to serve as a placeholder for the Framework and the tools, as well as user guide with full description of the tools involved;2) A set of Jupyter notebook templates and examples of the workflows of case studies;3)Access points to the data needed and tools for data manipulation and visualisation for the ClimateRiskAssessment;4) Access to computational and storage resources, using JupyterHub hosting all the repositories with the workflow examplesThe heart of the CLIMAAX toolbox is Jupyter ecosystem with the JupyterBook used for the technology for Handbook, JupyterHub for the collaborative cloud environment and Jupyter notebooks for the executable examples. It will also have Jupyter lab enabled for users and Jupyter books for wiki, documentation and templates. With these resources at hand, both technical and non-technical persons have a tool that will provide a homogenous tool to perform local and regional climate risk assessments.The project started in January 2023, and the operational version of the toolbox implemented during Spring 2024. This poster we will share the design and implementation of the CLIMAAX toolbox, as well as lessons learned and challenges from the process of building it.