Welcome to the climate change hot-spots identification and prioritisation service (HIPS)! Our key objective is to identify regions that have the highest exposure to climate risks, the highest vulnerability and/or the lowest adaptive capacity to climate change, so these must be prioritized for climate change adaptation measures. HIPS utilizes climate projections and socio-economic variables into the assessment, at multiple NUTS regional scales, leveraging datasets from various sources at different resolutions. The identification and subsequent prioritization of climate change hot-spots that emerge not only because of change in climatic variables but also because of their combination with other socioeconomic factors is pivotal for the European Union’s Climate Adaptation Strategy. Climate change inevitably affects all Europeans, but the level of impact differs across groups and populations across society. EU and national climate policies should draw attention to vulnerable groups and implement equitable adaptation solutions with fair societal consensus and preserving productive sectors. For this purpose, HIPS comprises a) a context broker and a database to gather and store a multitude of vastly different datasets ranging from climate projections to socioeconomic drivers from various sources, b) tools for curating datasets in a common regional format using the EU nomenclature of NUTS levels, c) methodologies and routines for analysing customizable hot-spots, d) a mapping service for visualization and e) a GUI for user interaction. With HIPS, stakeholders can set-up customized hot-spot analysis by combining different future climate projections with other indicators, leveraging a comprehensive indicators and metrics framework. Therefore, decision making and strategies about specific adaptation measures at a region are supported. HIPS is under active development within the EU funded IMPETUS research project (www.climate-impetus.eu) and it will continue to be updated with more datasets and features as the project matures. HIPS will help support the European Commission’s Green Deal and the Adaptation Strategy that aims to increase and accelerate the EU’s efforts to protect nature, people and livelihoods against the unavoidable impacts of climate change.
