ERA4CS Joint Call on Researching and Advancing Climate Services Development by Advanced co-development with users

Following the accession of Slovakia and the Czech Republic, the number of international partners increased from 16 to 18.

The French National Research Agency, in partnership with 18 European countries, is set to launch a joint call for proposals through the ERA-Net Cofund ERA4CS (European Research Area for Climate Services). With a total budget of about 72 Mio €, this joint call for funding multilateral research projects on “development of efficient Climate Services in Europe” opens on 1st March 2016.

The climate science community finds itself increasingly exposed to various groups of stakeholders asking rather specific questions about consequences, uncertainties, probabilities related to climate and climate change. As a consequence the concept of "climate services" has recently emerged. This term refers to all information and services that assess and qualify the past climate, present and future, to assess the impacts of climate change on socio-economic activities and the environment or to undertake mitigation measures and adaptation.

Contrary to much of the climate research that generally involves a lot of international cooperation, the work on Climate Services is generally organised on a national level. The ERA-NET Consortium “European Research Area for Climate Services”, so-called ERA4CS, has been designed to boost the development of efficient Climate Services in Europe, by supporting research for developing better tools, methods and standards on how to produce, transfer, communicate and use reliable climate information to cope with current and future climate variability. First activities start in 2016 with the launch of a large scale Joint Transnational Call for research proposals with cash and institutional funding from at least 18 countries and co-fund support of the European Commission (under Grant Agreement reference 690462). The call is funded with up to 72 Mio € by Partner Organizations and co-funding by the European Commission. Two distinct but coherent topics, with independent funding support, are proposed within this call :

Topic A - Innovative co-development with users

This topic seeks to advance understanding in the following domains :

• Research in support of the development and deployment of Climate Services
• Research to integrate Climate Science to application cases and decision making
• Research for co-development of innovative Climate services

It will be supported by cash funding from the following national Research Funding Organizations (RFOs) :

Topic B - Institutional integration between the ERA4CS Research Performing Organizations

This topic seeks to advance understanding in the following domains :

• Development of new methods and tools
• Impacts studies and models
• Localisation of Climate Information and Uncertainties Evaluation

It will be supported in kind by the following Research Performing Organisations (RPOs) :

General conditions for application

Proposals require eligible partners from three or more different countries participating in ERA4CS.

Topic A is open to all applicants, subject to national funding rules of the RFOs. Topic B is open only to the RPOs who are partner of ERA4CS Consortium (see provisional list above). Topic B is open only to the RPOs who are partner of ERA4CS Consortium (see provisional list above).

Submission and evaluation of projects will be carried out in two stages and integrated with other countries. Only successful consortia at the pre-proposal stage will be invited to submit a full proposal.