- 47 Principal Investigators
- 10 Project partners
- 20 Partner institutions
- 22 Stakeholder organizations
NCCR-CLIM+ and the new Center for Climate Extremes and Resilience in Swiss Society (CERESS) will unite expertise from both the natural and social sciences through truly innovative inter- and transdisciplinary research. Together, NCCR-CLIM+ and CERESS will inform Swiss policymakers and the public about physical climate risks and develop adaptation solutions that account for societal trade-offs and co-benefits across key sectors. With its unique research consortium, NCCR-CLIM+ will support Switzerland's effective transformation towards a more resilient and safer future.
Recent devastating high-impact climate extremes in Switzerland and around
the world have highlighted the implications of increasing human-induced
climate change. Switzerland is strongly affected, with an observed warming
two times larger than mean global warming and with demonstrated rapid
changes in climate extremes, including heatwaves, droughts, and heavy
precipitation, as well as compound events.
In addition, climate disasters across the globe can have indirect but
pronounced impacts on Switzerland. They can, e.g., affect supply chains
and the global economy, in particular if extremes occur in multiple
regions concurrently. Failure to achieve the aims set under the Paris
Agreement would further amplify changes in climate extremes and increase
the risk of unprecedented events, causing long-term disruptions and
repeated societal crises.
NCCR-CLIM+ will address emerging research questions on societal
transformation in the context of climate change mitigation and societal
resilience, in fields ranging from federalism and governance, economics,
ethics, and law, to climate communication and behavior changes.
In the context of amplifying changes in climate extremes, the
transformations necessary for climate change adaptation and mitigation
represent an enormous technical, political, and socio-economic challenge.
To tackle this challenge, NCCR-CLIM+ will establish the first fully
interdisciplinary, Switzerland-wide climate research community, which
will interact with stakeholders ranging from public health to finance,
agriculture, and water management.
By pooling competence from leading Swiss research institutions across
multiple natural and social science disciplines, NCCR-CLIM+ will combine
fundamental knowledge with transformational knowledge. This unique
vantage point allows it to make groundbreaking contributions to both the
understanding of climate change challenges and the development of
innovative solutions for adaptation and mitigation, while considering
interactions between climate change, ecosystems, and society.
NCCR-CLIM+ partners and the new Center for Climate
Extremes and Resilience in Swiss Society (CERESS)
Under the lead of ETH Zurich and the University of Bern the newly founded Center for Climate Extremes and Resilience in Swiss Society (CERESS) will connect with numerous further universities and climate centers across Switzerland. CERESS will support nationwide research, co-design living labs, and produce actionable solutions, thus forming a new transdisciplinary nexus between science, society, practice, and politics.
The unique interdisciplinarity of NCCR-CLIM+
To facilitate cross-disciplinary communication and provide actionable
knowledge, NCCR-CLIM+ will develop storylines of self-consistent plausible
futures encompassing the physical and social dimensions of extreme
climate outcomes. The storylines offer cross-disciplinary narratives that
allow researchers to carefully quantify and assess any co-benefits and
trade-offs of transformation to enable enhancement of societal resilience.
NCCR-CLIM+ will pioneer novel approaches in physics-based and data-driven
climate modeling, leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) / machine
learning and modern statistical methods. It will make major contributions
to emerging climate research on compound extremes and “record-shattering”
high-impact low-likelihood events, and further the understanding of
potential impacts of global and regional tipping points (abrupt changes)
in Switzerland and Europe.
NCCR-CLIM+ storylines in pictograms
With its unprecedented scale and scope of collaborative climate research, NCCR-CLIM+ represents a unique and timely effort to foster societal resilience towards climate extremes. By delivering learnings, solutions, and structures that last, NCCR-CLIM+ will make a difference not only for research, but for society at large.