Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense, sometimes with tragic consequences. Europe’s coastal cities are preparing to meet the challenges with help from nature and data from outer space.
As the people of La Faute-Sur-Mer – a small French coastal town in the Vendée north of La Rochelle – tucked into bed on the night of 27 February 2010, a violent storm was raging out at sea.
Swirling, cyclonic winds, high waves and heavy rain blown up across the Bay of Biscay combined with a high spring tide to wreak havoc as it battered the coastline of western France. Residents awoke to a scene of utter devastation.
Perched perilously between the Atlantic Ocean on one side and the river Lay on the other, the town was completely inundated by flooding from the storm surge. Homes, property and businesses were ruined.
Of the 53 people in France who died as a result of Storm Xynthia, 29 were from La Faute.
In a town with a population of just 1000 people, it was a devastating tragedy.
Such extreme weather events are becoming more common and seaside regions are particularly vulnerable, says Dr Clara Armaroli, a coastal geomorphologist who specializes in coastal dynamics (how coastlines evolve).
In response, the University School for Advanced Studies (IUSS) in Pavia, Italy, is leading a pan-European project to develop an early-warning system to increase coastal resilience. Armaroli coordinates the project, called the European Copernicus Coastal Flood Awareness System (ECFAS).
‘Given climate change and sea-level rise, we know there will be an increase in the tendency and the magnitude of coastal storms,’ Dr Armaroli said.
‘What’s needed is an awareness system at a European level to inform decisions.’
ECFAS has been set up to develop a proof-of-concept for an early-warning system for coastal flooding. It will develop a functional and operational design.
It draws on data and uses tools from the EU’s Copernicus Earth observation satellites and from the Copernicus Services.
Central to this is how data about storm surges, magnitude of flooding and potential impact could be incorporated into the EU’s Copernicus Emergency Management Service (Copernicus EMS).
Copernicus EMS is a space-based monitoring service for Europe and the globe that uses satellite data to spot signs of impending disaster, whether from forest fires, droughts or river flooding.
Coastal flooding is not yet part of the Copernicus emergency management mix so ECFAS wants to ‘plug the gap’ says Armaroli.
This will ensure that coastal flooding is monitored in future and that such vulnerabilities become part of its watching brief.
In addition to charting the progression of storms that break on Europe’s coastlines, the ECFAS team is integrating data about the changes to shorelines caused by coastal erosion. It’s a growing concern as sea-levels rise across the globe.
‘The vulnerability and exposure of our coastal areas are also increasing due to erosion, which is narrowing the boundary between the land and the sea,’ said Dr Armaroli.
The early-warning system will gather data from an array of sources, all of which impact flood risk. This includes geographic factors such as land use and cover, soil type, tidal changes, wave components and sea levels.
It is being designed to provide forecasts for coastal storm hazards up to five days out. Potentially, it could work in tandem with pre-existing regional and national systems to improve local defenses.
Looking beyond the proof-of-concept stage, Armaroli hopes ECFAS-Warning for coastal awareness can play a critical role in helping areas better prepare for when disaster strikes.
‘Our work has started a process, but in the future, we hope this can really help increase the resilience of our coastal areas to the coming extreme weather events,’ she said.
On the west coast of Ireland, in the Atlantic seaport town of Sligo, an environmental engineer named Dr Salem Gharbia is taking the challenges faced by coastal cities to the next level.
With the project – SCORE – Smart Control of the Climate Resilience in European Cities – Dr Gharbia’s team is building a network of ‘living labs’ to rapidly and sustainably enhance local resilience to coastal damage.
‘Coastal cities face major challenges currently because they are so densely populated and because their location makes them vulnerable to sea-level rise and climate change,’ he said.
With SCORE’s network of 10 coastal cities – from Sligo to Benidorm, Dublin to Gdańsk – Dr Gharbia intends to create an integrated solution that should help coastal centres to mitigate the risks.
‘The main idea behind the concept is that we have coastal cities learning from each other,’ he said.
‘Each living lab faces different local challenges,’ he said, ‘But each has been established to include citizens, local stakeholders, engineers, and scientists to co-create solutions that can increase local resilience.’
Through the network, SCORE wants to pioneer nature-based solutions such as the restoration of floodplains or wetlands that reduce the risk of flooding in coastal regions. It’s a model that is already proving effective.
One example, a project to bio-engineer sand dunes in Sligo for stronger natural defenses, is also being tested in Portugal.
The team is developing smart technologies to monitor and evaluate emerging coastal risks. In addition to using existing Earth observation data, this means the community can become involved through new citizen science projects aimed at expanding local data collection.
In Sligo, locals are already getting involved in the monitoring of coastal erosion using what Dr Gharbia terms ‘DIY sensors’ – drone kites – equipped with cameras, to survey local topography.
Elsewhere, citizens are helping to monitor and record water levels and quality, as well as wind speed and direction with a variety of other sensors.
Sustaining local citizen involvement in this way is crucial to SCORE’s success, said Gharbia.
‘It’s essential that this is two-way for citizens,’ he said.
Without engaging them fully in the process of co-design and co-creation of ideas to mitigate risks, you will never get them committed to the types of solution proposed.’
All of this, of course, is creating a wealth of new data from a multitude of sources. But Dr Gharbia is adamant that an integrated approach is critical.
‘The main reason we’re developing this system is,’ he said, ‘We’ve realised that to increase climate resilience we have to utilise all the information coming in from different sources.’
Ultimately, the goal behind the work is for a real-time, early warning system that could be used by local and regional policy makers to test a range of ‘what if’ scenarios.
Currently, the team are categorising the data and optimising the systems and models. In time, they hope other regions can learn from the approach and develop similar living labs.
Dr Gharbia said the impact of his research project should be ‘to create an integrated solution that can be used in multiple different locations and can make a big impact in increasing local coastal resilience.’
Resilience like it should spread far and wide. ‘The main purpose is a solution that can be replicated and scaled up,’ said Dr Gharbia. The tragic consequences of more frequent and more intense coastal storms must be averted.
The research in this article was funded by the EU. If you liked this article, please consider sharing it on social media.
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With more people getting on track for sustainable high-speed rail, reducing noise pollution and sophisticated traffic management will boost adoption.
The whistle coming down the tracks is the sound of Europe’s rail renaissance. Coming round the bend is increased adoption of high-speed rail transportation which promises to reduce road traffic and to curb harmful emissions. Cars are major culprits in air pollution, accounting for 14.5% of Europe’s total carbon emissions. Around half the flights in Europe are short haul journeys of less than 1 500km which generates many more emissions than the equivalent journey by rail.
The European Green Deal policy features plans to double high-speed rail by 2030 and triple it by 2050. At the moment, 75% of freight is moved by road, so movement of goods by rail is set to double by 2050.
Making trains more competitive with road and air travel means market reform and improvements to the passenger experience as well as infrastructural upgrades. Prioritising sustainable rail transport promises significant benefits but unfortunately, it comes with unseen dangers of its own and not just for passengers.
One of the lesser-known hazards of rail transport is the kind of noise pollution nobody can hear. Inaudible, low frequency ground vibrations emanate from the rolling stock on the railway as it passes. As well as affecting the structural integrity of nearby infrastructure, these vibrations can have a detrimental effect on people’s health, causing headaches, fatigue and even irritability in people experiencing them.
‘Right now, it is possible to reduce vibrations by putting rubber pads under the tracks,’ said Giovanni Capellari, co-founder of Phononic Vibes. ‘That system is okay for new railways because you can put them in during construction.’ His company specialises in noise and vibration technology. For an existing railway line, rubber pads are very expensive because you have to remove the tracks to install them, according to Capellari.
The BioMetaRail project is researching and developing special submerged barriers that can be deployed alongside the track to absorb the vibrations. The barrier walls rely on their shape for their noise reduction performance, rather than the properties of the material.
Known as metamaterials, these synthetic composite materials have designer properties not found in nature. Their internal structures are engineered to interact with the low frequency sound waves of a passing train to trap and insulate against them.
‘Basically, the idea is that we use shapes that have some resonant effects at frequencies that are typical for vibrations in the railway sector,’ Capellari said. In this context, the frequency of vibrations is typically between 30 and 60 Hertz. The result is a design for a two-by-three metre concrete structure that resembles a large window.
This ‘works for very low frequencies, which is very good for railway trains.’ Additionally, the “window panes” could be divided into even smaller sizes to trap a wider range of frequencies.
If the panels did not have their distinctive shape and design and were simply slabs of concrete, they would not be able to halt the train’s ground-borne vibrations as effectively as BioMetaRail’s barriers. For ease of installation, there is no need to lift the railway line as these panels can be inserted into the ground alongside the track like a sunken fence, to protect clusters of homes or buildings.
The research team is also investigating the ideal material, thickness and sizes of the barriers for their vibration damping effects.
Capellari’s BioMetaRail project is an offshoot of the BOHEME project, which stands for Bio-Inspired Hierarchical MetaMaterials. BOHEME investigates and develops different types of mechanical metamaterials inspired by principles found in nature.
From spider webs to shell whorls, BOHEME characterises natural systems and studies their possible applications. ‘The goal is to take the results from BOHEME and try to understand the best geometry (for the rail barriers) considering the market, the cost, production and installation,’ said Capellari.
‘The next step is to go to market,’ he said, as well as obtain certification for the vibration-blocking intervention. ‘There’s no such kind of system in the market right now.’
Ultimately, these panels will be lining the ground alongside the track in residential areas, allowing rail networks to significantly boost their train traffic without adversely affecting the people and buildings nearby.
In 2021, it was proposed to increase speed limits on Trans-European Transport Network trains to 160km/h or more by 2040. Increasing rail traffic also makes it vital that network operators are able to monitor the entire length of their railroads in real time. Acoustic monitoring can help achieve both these goals.
Richard Aaroe’s Next Generation Rail Technologies has developed a passive listening device that can provide railroad operators with an early warning about obstructions on the track. It can even predict what the obstruction most likely is, and where it might be found. The SAFETRACK project is working on a standalone system to ‘give accurate real-time warning of anything that happens on the infrastructure,’ Aaroe said.
The system comprises sensors, which pick up vibrations on the track, and software that identifies where on the track the sound originates and what could have caused it.
‘In a way, it is a very, very sophisticated microphone,’ Aaroe explained. The acoustic vibrations on the track that are picked up by the sensors have a ‘unique fingerprint’. The sound of a tree branch falling on the track is distinct from a mudslide, for example. Aaroe’s company has built up a ‘library’ of these railway acoustic fingerprints.
He compares the technology to when submarines use sonar to detect surface ships by picking up its acoustic signature. ‘Today, that technology has evolved so that you can not only pick up that there is a vessel passing, but you can pick up the type of engine, the class of the vessel itself, the speed, direction, and so on,’ Aaroe said.
The same principles apply with rail acoustics. ‘Every incident has a uniqueness and we have identified that and then we can report this to either the train controller, operator or even the driver themselves.’
The sensors are relatively small, about the size of a smartphone. An installation includes four sensors, one on each rail of the track and then another two 10 metres further along the track. Because sound travels through solid rails much better than through air, one sensor package can detect acoustic vibrations five kilometres in each direction.
The technology is currently being trialled by national rail networks in the UK, Germany and Spain, and it will soon be deployed in another three countries, according to Aaroe.
The European Union is committed to growing its rail transportation as part of the European Green Deal which aims to make Europe the first carbon-neutral continent by 2050. As more people opt for rail over cars, technology that makes trains safer and quieter will increasingly be important.
The research in this article was funded by the EU. This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.
From the possible demise of Merlot grapes in Bordeaux to loss of olive trees in north Africa, the impacts of climate change will be felt by farmers across the Mediterranean region, say climatologists.
To help the region’s agricultural producers cope with shifting weather patterns, and make strategic decisions now for the future, scientists are researching new growing techniques, and creating climate forecasts.
The Mediterranean Basin – comprising countries bordering the Mediterranean Sea – is a climate hotspot. It is experiencing faster than average rises in temperature and may suffer major losses of rainfall in future decades.
Wine makers are among those already feeling the effects.
‘Climate change is not only a thing of the future it is happening now. We see an increase of mean temperatures, and this already has an impact on grape growing,’ said Josep Maria Solé Tasias, coordinator of VISCA, a project developing forecasts and pruning techniques to help vineyards adapt to climate change.
One impact is that higher temperatures make grapes ripen too early, before their aromas have had a chance to fully develop. ‘That is something the wineries are very worried about,’ said Solé Tasias who is a civil engineer at Meteosim SL, a Spanish company offering meteorological services.
In southwestern France, the Bordeaux region’s famous Merlot and Sauvignon blanc grapes are expected to be victims of climate change, so wine makers there are testing more resilient grape varieties from southern and eastern Europe.
Another solution is to find plots of land in more northern or elevated cooler locations to plant for the future.
But small wineries will find it difficult to make such large investments, says Solé Tasias. So VISCA has been testing some innovative farming techniques to see if they can minimise the damage.
These include ‘crop forcing’, which involves pruning vines so the grapes mature later in the growing season once temperatures have dropped. But deciding when to prune is difficult – too early or too late in the growing season would impact the harvest.
VISCA has developed seasonal forecasts which are helping farmers assess the best times to apply these techniques. They use detailed data about the vineyard – including location, soil type, and grape variety – to estimate when vines will produce buds or grapes will ripen, as well as predicting temperatures and rainfall.
But unlike short-term weather forecasts which can accurately predict whether there will be a frost or warm sunshine, seasonal forecasts of up to six months ahead are much less certain. Knowing how to use them for decision-making is complex, says Solé Tasias.
‘Farmers at the moment don’t know exactly how to use them – they are used to making decisions in the short-term,’ said Solé Tasias.
A seasonal forecast could for example say there is 60% probability there will be a particularly warm summer. If a farmer delays the ripening of their grapes based on this assumption, they may lose money if the summer turns out to be normal.
‘Farmers have to understand that their decision can result in losses,’ said Solé Tasias.
To help with this, VISCA has worked with some wineries to create a list of actions based on each short-term and seasonal forecast – for example, buy more chemicals to deal with a possible spike in pest numbers, or prune the vines to delay the grape harvest – and spell out the financial risks associated with each option.
The options and risks will be tailored to each vineyard or winery. And the more information the researchers have about the vineyard, the better they can forecast, they say.
Long-term climate forecasting is particularly difficult in the Mediterranean region, says Dr Alessandro Dell’Aquila, co-coordinator of the MED-GOLD project, which is developing climate services for pasta, olive oil and wine producers.
‘It has an intrinsic unpredictability because there is a lot of noise due to large-scale (atmospheric) movements and perturbations,’ said Dr Dell’Aquila, who is a climatologist at the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA).
The tropics, by contrast, are more stable, which means that seasonal forecasts for coffee, tea, maize and other crops in parts of Africa and South America could be more accurate.
But seasonal forecasts will still be vital for Mediterranean farmers despite their uncertainty, says Dr Dell’Aquila.
The longer-term impacts of climate change on the Mediterranean are likely to be severe.
‘The Mediterranean could look very different in future decades. We may have completely different species of animals or insects that could arrive from the tropics, and we could experience loss of local biodiversity,’ said Dr Dell’Aquila.
We could also have less water available, including for agricultural purposes, he says. ‘And the region may experience a higher number of (severe) heatwaves.’
Some crops will need to be grown on higher ground or further north where the climate will be cooler and wetter. More field irrigation will be needed and, in the case of grapes, different varieties will have to be grown.
Parts of Europe may open up for wine and olive oil production for the first time, while other areas may see a collapse.
‘There are some ideas of moving olive trees northward to new growing regions. And parts of the Mediterranean – for example, north Africa – could become too hot for olive groves.’
Similarly, while wine production has recently expanded in the UK and Denmark, certain southern Italian wines may become extremely rare within the next decade, Dr Dell’Aquila says.
EU policy needs to change to support producers adapting to climate change, he says. Rules that regulate the composition of wines, for example, could be changed to allow producers to use different varieties of grape – even grapes from different regions – without changing the name of the wine. ‘This could be very important for consumers because they want to go to the supermarket and find a (Chianti), and the name of this wine is clearly defined in some EU rules.’
In the meantime, producers need to act now. ‘Wine-makers should start thinking now where they can buy new plots of land and start planting grapes as an investment for the next 10 or 20 years,’ said Dr Dell’Aquila.
The research in this article was funded by the EU. This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.
As the climate changes, we need to prepare for its impacts and take action to minimise the damage to our environment, society and economy. This is known as climate adaptation.
On 24 February 2021, the EU published its climate adaptation strategy which sets out how to make Europe more climate resilient and protect people from the impacts of climate change, such as heatwaves and flooding. Follow the link for more information on the EU strategy on adaptation to climate change.
Even while drought is bringing many of Europe’s rivers to record lows and damaging biodiversity, the threat of catastrophic flooding following a dry spell lurks in the background.
Some of Europe’s most famous rivers such as the Rhine, Danube and Po, have been making headline news thanks to summer droughts. With water levels plummeting to record lows and the rivers drying out, many kinds of economic activities from shipping to farming have been disrupted.
But one little river in Europe that has avoided the media spotlight may offer valuable lessons about the worsening effects of global warming. It is the Albarine, located in south-eastern France and it is the focus of an EU-backed research project about the effects of drought on river ecosystems.
Worldwide, rivers are under stress from climate change. The research will help conservationists to understand the ways drought leads to the loss of biodiversity and respond appropriately.
Rising near the sleepy French town of Brénod near the Jura mountains, the Albarine flows almost 60 kilometres before its crystal-clear waters join the larger Ain River northeast of Lyon. However, there are a number of points during its course at which the Albarine river runs dry. This is something likely to happen to more waterways as global warming intensifies.
‘Drying is an event and drought is an extreme event,’ said Romain Sarremejane, a freshwater ecologist and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) post-doctoral research fellow at the French National Institute for Agriculture, Food, and Environment (INRAE).
‘You need to understand drying to understand drought. The issue might be in the future that, if you have big droughts, you will lose all the refuges where species might survive during a drying event.’
Sarremejane is part of the MetaDryNet research project, which is assessing how drying affects organisms in the Albarine and their ability to consume carbon-rich organic matter. At its lush headwaters near Brénod, many leaves fall into the Albarine – and this leaf litter provides food and nutrients along the river’s length.
Insects and other creatures nibble at them, and ‘little by little they decompose as you go downstream and then it’s very small particles that end up in the sea,’ Sarremejane said. ‘But when there is drying everywhere in the network, you have these leaves that accumulate in the dry riverbed and are not processed.’
This leaf build-up could result in creatures downstream going hungry and the river processing less carbon.
Sarremejane and his colleagues set out to investigate what happens in the Albarine’s dry patches. They sampled 20 sites, each about 100 metres long, to see how much organic matter passed through, how quickly it decomposed, how much carbon and methane each site emitted, and the diversity of invertebrates, bacteria and fungi present.
Half the sites were in areas where the river sometimes runs dry and the rest were in places where the river flows all year long.
As more places are dry for longer, this could also compromise the ability of creatures to move between parts of the river –– which could ultimately lead to a decrease in biodiversity as well as extinction.
About 60% of rivers worldwide are intermittent –– which means that they are dry for at least one day a year –– and that share is set to rise, according to Sarremejane. Many such waterways usually flow for six to eight months of the year and then dry during the summer.
‘This intermittency is becoming more and more common, and extending in time and space,’ he said.
If a river’s dry patches increase and expand for longer periods of time, these oases in the river where life weathers the drying may disappear too. ‘There is a big tipping point at which you might lose a lot of diversity,’ he said.
His future research will focus on how extreme weather events affect communities of creatures and their diversity in Europe’s rivers, and whether it is possible to quantify these tipping points.
For all the difficulties triggered by droughts, rain itself poses challenges. When drought-hit areas eventually get rain, it tends to be heavier and harder to absorb, leading to floods which is one of the most catastrophic effects of climate change in European cities.
Benjamin Renard, principal investigator on the Hydrologic Extremes at the Global Scale (HEGS) project, is trying to understand what more precipitation means for river systems and whether it leads to more flooding.
River floods are among the most damaging extreme climate events in Europe, according to the European Environment Agency (EEA). If carbon emissions continue to increase, climate change could triple the direct damages from river floods.
In cities, more rain leads to flooding in the streets, but with rivers it’s not so simple.
‘You have river catchments, which act as a strong filter, so many things could happen,’ Renard said. ‘Flooding is not a direct translation of what’s happening in terms of precipitation.’
He and his collaborators created a statistical framework to assess the probability of rivers in an area flooding. Using data from about 2 000 rain-gauge and hydrometric stations, which measure river flow, their framework can determine the likelihood of a flood in a given region. The data, taken from stations around the world, spans the last hundred years.
‘The data sets we use for both precipitation and floods are from every single continent except Antarctica,’ he said.
The framework links climate variables – such as temperature, atmospheric pressure and wind speed – to the probability of extreme weather events including heavy rainfall or flooding.
‘We confirmed, indeed, that precipitation was getting heavier worldwide, but for floods the signal is much more complicated,’ Renard said. ‘You have some geographic areas where you don’t see much change, some areas where you see increasing floods, and some where you see decreasing floods.’
Renard plans to use the framework for seasonal forecasting or even for different extreme weather events.
‘There is nothing in the framework that is specific to flooding,’ he said. Researchers could configure the framework to other events such as heat waves, droughts and wildfires.
In any case, deploying it for seasonal forecasting would form part of a useful early-warning system. This would allow people to prepare, for example, for nearby river floods and help prevent the loss of life and destruction of property.
The research in this article was funded by the EU. This article was originally published in Horizon, the EU Research and Innovation Magazine.
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