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CoCliME Partners meet for the 1st project General Assembly

20 Nov 2018

Co-Development of Climate Services for Adaptation to Changing Marine Ecosystems

Sorbonne Université hosted the 1st CoCliME General Assembly at Campus Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris.

At the meeting, partners got to work discussing the projects progress over the last year, exchanging information on key achievements, and planning activities for year ahead. The partners learned about the different research, communication with end users and stakeholders and other coordination activities conducted in the case studies, namely in Irish Atlantic, French Atlantic, Baltic Sea, Black Sea, Mediterranean, North and Norwegian Seas.

CoCliME is an international collaborative project that integrates a broad range of disciplines. How are these disciplines interacting to produce our overall output, i.e. climate services to help society to adapt to future scenarios of harmful algae and microbial events in European coastal waters. Projects are often portrayed as either multidisciplinary, interdisciplinary, or transdisciplinary but what are the differences?

Multidisciplinary: will use two or more disciplines to look at an issue from their point of view and through a simple additive process, come up a solution with little interaction across the disciplines.

Interdisciplinary: describes a project that has a higher level of integration between two or more disciplines that may affect the output from the other disciplines.

Transdisciplinary: describes a project that will bring a number of different disciplines together and using a holistic approach can produce an outcome greater than the sum of the individual disciplines acting alone. 

The CoCliME project integrates a transdisciplinary team with a mixture of social scientists and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) scientists. This approach allows us to explore and understand the potential impacts that climate change will have on harmful algal blooms (HABs) and the social and economic ramifications for coastal zones. The CoCliME transdisciplinary team-based research approach, focused on identifying future issues of a changing marine ecosystem, ensures effective communication across the climate service value-chain.

Throughout the meeting, project partners split into smaller groups to hold breakout sessions that focused on:

  • Development of user-driven climate services.
  • Observation and model data sources for CoCliME services.
  • Ecological and socio-economic impacts of past and current HAB events.
  • Discussion on climate indicator development across the case study regions.

An important aspect of the meeting was the opportunity for the partners to meet face-to-face and this facilitated improved communication and collaboration between organisations from around Europe.  If you would like more information on CoCliME you can contact us by email or follow us on Twitter.