CASCADES – Cascading Climate risks towards Adaptive and Resilient European Societies

The CASCADES project seeks to understand the conditions under which climate risks propagate beyond their geographical, sectoral, and temporal location in ways that may affect European stability and cohesion. Its main aim is to identify the policy leverage points that can help the EU to adapt and respond to such cascading climate risks.

CASCADES will work with a diverse range of stakeholders – both within and outside Europe – to support the design of a coherent European policy framework to address these risks and will bridge natural and social sciences and integrate stakeholder knowledge and perceptions of climate risks. The natural and social science research methods include amongst others simulations with a wide array of economic and process-based models, cross-sectoral analysis, network analysis, policy analysis, thematic workshops, interviews, focus groups, statistical analysis of existing datasets and gender analysis integrated in a common scenario framework.

Moreover, policy simulations will be used to engage diverse stakeholders across disciplines, sectors and geographies to enable the consideration of a wide range of topics in the research process: from socio-economic impacts to physical infrastructure damage; from changing disease and nutritional patterns to forced displacement, trade disruption, financial and political instability, and conflict. Only by using a combination of such methods, within a truly interdisciplinary setting, can the consequences of climatic extremes and slow-onset changes be better understood. The relationship between CASCADES and stakeholders is bidirectional to ensure that the cascading risk pathways proposed within the project relate to challenges stakeholders are dealing with and are scrutinized using their expert knowledge.