DevelopIng STratEgies by integrating mitigatioN, aDaptation and participation to climate changE Risks

DISTENDER will provide integrated strategies by building a methodological framework that guide the integration of climate change
(CC) adaptation and mitigation strategies through participatory approaches in ways that respond to the impacts and risks of climate
change (CC), supported by quantitative and qualitative analysis that facilitates the understanding of interactions, synergies and tradeoffs.
Holistic approaches to mitigation and adaptation must be tailored to the context-specific situation and this requires a flexible
and participatory planning process to ensure legitimate and salient action, carried out by all important stakeholders. DISTENDER will
develop a set of multi-driver qualitative and quantitative socio-economic-climate scenarios through a facilitated participatory process
that integrates bottom-up knowledge and locally-relevant drivers with top-down information from the global European Shared
Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs) and downscaled Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) from IPCC. A cross-sectorial and
multi-scale impact assessment modelling toolkit will be developed to analyse the complex interactions over multiple sectors,
including an economic evaluation framework. The economic impact of the different efforts will be analyse, including damage claim
settlement and how do sectoral activity patterns change under various scenarios considering indirect and cascading effects. It is an
innovative project combining three key concepts: cross-scale, integration/harmonization and robustness checking. DISTENDER will
follow a pragmatic approach applying methodologies and toolkits across a range of European case studies (six core case studies and
five followers) that reflect a cross-section of the challenges posed by CC adaptation and mitigation. The knowledge generated by
DISTENDER will be offered by a Decision Support System (DSS) which will include guidelines, manuals, easy-to-use tools and
experiences from the application of the cases studies.