Feasibility Study for the organisation of the Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change – SOCEUM

The study focuses on the institutional, organisational and financial feasibility of the Centre, linked to its scientific mission. The final output will consist in a set of documents identifying the most appropriate options for the following issues: the institutional regime of the consortium, the organisational structure of the Centre, financial feasibility of the Centre both at starting up as running costs level; legal and administrative issues connected with the Centre realisation.

In the last decade problems connected to climate changes have dramatically increased. Climate change has become a factor playing a key role on socio-economic and regional development. International negotiations have been started up aimed at reaching global agreements for developing and implementing climate policies able to reduce the impacts of human activities on climate change, in particular by GHG emissions control.

National initiatives have also been started up in nearly all G7 countries, but in Italy strong and interdisciplinary initiatives have hardly been developed. The Euro-Mediterranean Centre for Climate Change represents the most ambitious initiative undertaken in Italy, within the framework of the National Plan of Research (2001) and the National Research Plan on Climate. The Centre will inter alia provide to the following activities: development of simulations and scenarios focused on the Mediterranean area, particularly complex climate models suites and MonteCarlo ensembles predictions, and suites of socio-economic impacts models; creation of climate data sets at high resolution on the Mediterranean area; forecast systems of the Mediterranean sea; analysis and assessment of the regional effects of climate change and interaction with the global ones; national and international assessment of climate change mitigation policies and measures.

This feasibility study aims at conducting a preliminary analysis of the most appropriate structure of such a Centre, both under an organisational, administrative and financial as well as scientific perspective.

Therefore, the main aim is to identify optimal solutions for the following issues: activities to be carried out, organisational and institutional structures, national and international networks and linkages for its proper and efficient functioning, and resources needed for both starting up the Centre and its running costs.

Given that the Centre will provide a key contribution to climate research both at national and international level, it will have to be organised as to be well connected in the international context, i.e. within the European Union and with external partners of the European Union, in particular with the Mediterranean countries, the United States and Japan. In addition, multidisciplinarity of the research and training activities to be carried out requires a flexible structure able to connect public institutions such as Universities and public funded research organisations as well as private organisations or private companies.

The project is co-ordinated by the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanalogia (INGV) and involves the University di Lecce (UNILE) and the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM), which are all partners of the larger consortium that will be responsible for setting up this Centre.