NEXT GENERATION EU
KEY ENABLING TECHNOLOGIES

NEUROCLIMA: raising awareness on climate resilience strategies

NEUROCLIMA, a project coordinated by Professor Francesca Rizzo of the Department of Design at Politecnico di Milano, has kicked off; it is granted by the CINEA – European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency within the Horizon Europe framework programme.

NEUROCLIMA aims to promote and support systemic transformations by involving and raising awareness among citizens regarding climate resilience strategies. The project envisions the creation of a nervous system that connects policymakers, public institutions, and citizens through an innovative mixed decision support system that combines artificial intelligence and human capabilities.

By conducting in-depth research to identify needs, challenges, expectations, and trends that may influence EU societies, and a continuous dialogue among stakeholders, the goal is to develop concrete proposals to facilitate the green transition and enhance trust in institutions.

Training school on modelling compound climate-related events

The project “Training school on modelling compound climate-related events” has won a grant of 10,000 euros as a T.I.M.E. project.

June and July 2021 have been characterised by extraordinary natural events, like the heatwave occurred on the Pacific Coast of the United States and Canada, and the flood event occurred in Northern Europe. These events extended over rather large spatial and temporal scales, and manifested with cascading effects, interconnected behaviours and hazards. They are classified as “compound climate-related events”.

They are an emerging topic in science for the enormous impact on society. Compound climate-related events can pose serious threats to natural systems and human societies. Modelling and predicting compound events require knowledge on advanced statistical methods.

The project proposes a Training School on Modelling Compound climate-related Events to train the next generation of researchers and scientists to deal with such complex and impactful events. The school, targeted for PhD students, will be two weeks long, and provide tools and methodologies to investigate compound events. In addition, there will be ample time to work on scientific projects organized in four small groups and socialize with the other participants and lecturers.

The coordinator of the project is the Politecnico di Milano, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, with Prof. Carlo De Michele as principal investigator. The project involves also Technische Universität Dresden (Germany) and Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Belgium).

The T.I.M.E. Association (Top International Managers in Engineering), founded in 1989, is a network of leading technical universities and engineering schools in Europe and all over the world, with a strong international dimension in teaching, research and industrial relations. The association currently consists of 57 members in 25 countries, and the Politecnico di Milano is a member of the Advisory Committee.

Besides double degree activities, T.I.M.E. promotes a series of other initiatives, including the T.I.M.E. projects, through which the association co-finances new or existing initiatives between member universities, in which T.I.M.E. can represent an added value.

ERC Consolidator Grants to Massimo Tavoni’s EUNICE project

The European Research Council (ERC), the European Union organization that rewards talented scholars engaged in innovative research, is funding EUNICE, a project led by Prof. Massimo Tavoni from the Politecnico di Milano. The research project was selected from among more than 2,000 proposals received by ERC.This is a great result for the Politecnico, considering that this year only 11.8% of the projects submitted have obtained funding. In addition to these two projects, to date, a total of 49 ERC grants have been awarded to researchers from the Politecnico di Milano.

Massimo Tavoni, Professor of Engineering for the Environment and the Territory, has been awarded the grant for EUNICE, which aspires to correct the errors of the ensembles of climate-energy-economy models that study climate stabilization, and to develop methods to validate and confirm the intuitions of the scenarios.

The objective of the project is therefore to develop an innovative and integrated approach to quantify, translate, and communicate in an effective and timely manner the main uncertainties associated with low-carbon pathways and scenarios that explore very distant futures, renewing the methodological and experimental bases of model-based climate assessments.

EUNICE is a project of great relevance also for other research areas: the approach and innovations developed by EUNICE can in fact also be applied to other high-risk environmental, social, and technological assessments.

Its unique combination of computational and behavioural science and public engagement will be an important mediation tool in debates on fundamental decisions for our society, increasing confidence in and recognition of the scientific method.

ERC Consolidator Grants are intended for researchers with at least 7 years of experience since obtaining their PhD and with a very promising scientific profile. These are scholars who aim to consolidate their independence in research, strengthening their research group and continuing to develop a career in Europe. Funding can reach €2 million per single project, for a maximum duration of 5 years.

Potential for sustainable irrigation expansion in a 3 °C warmer climate

Matteo Sangiorgio, PhD student under the supervision of the prof. Giorgio Guariso, has published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) a study on the evolution of world agriculture in the new climatic conditions that could occur in the future: Potential for sustainable irrigation expansion in a 3 °C warmer climate.

Climate change is expected to reshape the distribution of irrigated lands. The research investigates global patterns of irrigation water demand and availability in 1.5 °C and 3 °C warmer climates. We find that up to 35% of currently rain-fed croplands, irrigation could be expanded without negative environmental externalities on freshwater resources. Irrigation expansion could improve crop productivity to feed up between 0.3 and 1.4 billion additional people with water storage of different size. This work identifies target regions in the world where investments in irrigation expansion are needed.

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), the official journal of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), is an authoritative source of high-impact, original research that broadly spans the biological, physical, and social sciences. The journal is global in scope and submission is open to all researchers worldwide.

PNAS is one of the world’s most-cited and comprehensive multidisciplinary scientific journals, publishing more than 3,300 research papers annually.

Questo sito utilizza i cookies per le statistiche e per agevolare la navigazione nelle pagine del sito e delle applicazioni web. Maggiori informazioni sono disponibili alla pagina dell'informativa sulla privacy

Accetto