While most people tend to address climate change as a problem that will happen in the future, when looking at the facts and scientific data, it is impossible to deny that it is already happening today and has a significant impact on the lives of many people. Temperature records are broken every year and the last decade has been the hottest since regular records have been kept.
It is clear that we must devise and deploy adaptation strategies to cope with ongoing issues such as the effects of droughts and extreme heat on the citizen’s physical and mental health, but also on economic activities, social issues such as equality and migration flows, and food security.
The very ambitious plans set by the previous European Commission through the European Green Deal will hopefully be effective in tackling this existential issue for the next few decades, not affecting the climate impact that is already happening right now. The effects of such policies are meant to deploy their positive effect on the overall climate trajectory over the next few years and decades.
In 2021, the European Commission adopted the EU strategy on adaptation to climate change. It draws how the European Union can adapt to the unavoidable impacts of climate change and become climate resilient by 2050. By pushing the frontiers of knowledge with more and better knowledge, the adaptation must be smarter, faster, more systemic and must step up international action for climate resilience, through stronger global engagement and exchanges.
Collaboration between the public and private sectors involving all the different stakeholders is thus crucial to maximise the focus on the problem, find shared solutions that enable rapid and effective adaptation, and avoid imbalances that could slow down the achievement of objectives.
This is precisely what NeuroClima aims to achieve. NeuroClima, a three-year Research and Innovation Initiative funded by the European Union under the Horizon Europe programme, aims to develop innovative practices, raise awareness and ensure the sustainable use of climate adaptation strategies. NeuroClima exploits the potential of artificial intelligence to continuously monitor digital media searching for emerging trends in the online debate about Climate Change, Climate adaptation and other climate-related topics. It fully supports the EU Adaptation Strategy and the Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change by developing frameworks, toolkits, recommendations, and promoting activities to address this crucial issue through participatory problem-solving approaches, and by fostering citizens’ climate literacy.
