Hydro Resilience: Citizen and Open Science for Climate Adaptation

Human-induced climate change is affecting weather and climate extremes worldwide and causing changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere leading to widespread adverse impacts on people and nature. These conditions have exposed people to reduced water security and negatively affected food security and ecosystem services.

Despite advances in climate and water sciences, there is still a significant gap between information availability and its uptake by stakeholders. Although there is abundant data and information available on the potential impacts of climate change, there is a lack of expert knowledge on the user side, which limits the development and implementation of effective adaptation strategies at the local level. There is also an opportunity to bring communities more on board to manage their climate risk through citizen engagement and to ensure that vulnerable communities can benefit from climate science foresight.

To address these challenges, a new project was developed called ‘Hydro Resilience: Citizen and Open Science for Climate Adaptation’ to pilot citizen and open science applications for climate risk management and to support water management under climate change uncertainty.