Future Climate, Impact and Emission Pathways and Infrastructure: Informing Risk, Transitions and Responses for Assessment and Society

FUTURA coordinates European modelling and infrastructure efforts to jointly develop and deploy a sustainable, aligned system for delivering future emissions scenarios, and climate and impact projections to provide responsive support to international assessments and European and international climate policy. The ambition is to catalyse a paradigm shift led by a pan-European effort to develop and implement a community-driven coordination process that enhances cross-community climate research. FUTURA explores how to design a new cyclical scenario generation protocol built from process-resolving models complemented by emulator and AI-based approaches, how to best align with assessment and policy timeframes, and how to leverage the model and data multiverse to advance understanding while supporting researchers, practitioners, and policymakers. Model output will be interconnected, by an enhanced infrastructure for rapid user access and download, as well as on-site tools for multi-model, multi-projection analysis. We evaluate the plausibility, risks, impacts, and potential reversibility of future climate pathways, including temperature overshoot. This system is harnessed to assess climate extremes, feedbacks and tipping elements; carbon budgets; socio-economic and environmental impacts from a changing climate and changing societal drivers, and the risks, realisability, and implications of different global warming pathways, including temperature overshoot. The project explores the climate data multiverse and demonstrates its value in delivering actionable science by developing guidance and methods such as storylines to assess and communicate plausible environmental and socio-economic futures, bringing global scale climate change information to the scales needed for policy making.