An EU-funded project has developed cross-border research clusters, designed to help European countries combine their knowledge and resources to tap funding opportunities and better tackle climate change.
Together with CIRCLE (which ran from 2004 until 2009), the EU-funded CIRCLE-2 project, which ended in April 2014, completes a decade of bringing together research and funding institutions to better target and more effectively allocate resources to cope with climate change.
The importance of this project should not be underestimated. Adaptation – anticipating the adverse effects of climate change and taking appropriate action such as using scarce water resources more efficiently and building better flood defences – could save Europe billions in damage repairs, not to mention lives. Resources however must be properly targeted if adaptation strategies are to be effective.
"This project was about coordinating research and funding institutions," explains CIRCLE-2 coordinator Tiago Capela Lourenço from the University of Lisbon, Portugal. "We designed transnational research agendas, and from these developed sub-networks made up of institutions in, for example, the Nordic, Mediterranean, Atlantic and mountainous regions of Europe."
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