SENSES ¨C Applied Climate Scenarios: Perspectives and Options for Action

In recent years, a new generation of climate scenarios based on a new scenario architecture has been developed within climate impact research. However, the contents and the meaning of the new scenarios are still difficult to understand for potential user groups, and there is a strong need to communicate new findings of scenario research in an application-oriented way.

To make complex scientific scenario information accessible, the project develops innovative and user-centred visualisation tools, practical guidelines and manuals and assembles them in the "SENSES-Toolkit".

The toolkit is aimed at (i) national and international climate policy makers, (ii) businesses, especially those with long-term planning horizons, and (iii) regional users of climate scenarios, and is the result of a process of co-design and co-production with representative expert panels from politics, business and regions.

The SENSES toolkit will enable the aforementioned user groups to process climate information and derive options for action from it. For example, policy makers can use the new scenario knowledge in discussions on the implementation of National Climate Contributions (NDCs) under the Paris Agreement; regional stakeholders can better understand the local impacts of global socio-economic and climate change; businesses can better assess the opportunities and risks of their investment projects in relation to climate change and climate policy development.

The University of Applied Sciences Potsdam will work on those sub-aspects of the SENSES project that are linked to issues of data visualisation, interaction design and the user-centred design process, coupled with the goal of conceiving, designing and implementing components in such a way as to enable users to work independently with climate data and climate scenarios. Data and expert knowledge are to be prepared in such a way that they can be understood by the broad user community. These components will be integrated into the SENSES toolkit on an online platform and made available to users.

SENSES is funded by the JPI Climate, the project executing agency is DLR-PT.