The PROSNOW project ambitions to build a demonstrator of a meteorological and climate prediction system from one week to several months ahead applied to snow management, specifically tailored to the needs of the ski industry using a co-design approach. This novel climate service holds significant potential to increase the resilience of socio-economic mountain stakeholders and supports their real-time climate change adaptation potential. PROSNOW will apply state-of-the-art knowledge relevant to the predictability of atmospheric and snow conditions, then develop products well beyond state-of-the-art operational tools. Improved anticipation capabilities at all time scales, spanning from “weather forecast” (up to 5 days typically) to “climate prediction” at the seasonal scale (up to several months), will be achieved through a seamless integration of weather and seasonal prediction products, together with snowpack models, in-situ and remotely-sensed observations and cutting-edge statistical tools in support of the decision making process. The project proposes an Alpine-wide system (France, Switzerland, Germany, Austria and Italy). It will associate research institutions for weather forecasts, climate predictions at the seasonal scale and snowpack modeling, a group of providers proposing high tech solutions for snow monitoring and management, and a relevant ensemble of eight representative resorts in the Alps. The added value of such services for ski resorts will be investigated and documented, making it possible to initiate a commercial exploitation of the service at the end of the project.

Urgent accelerated action is required to adapt to unavoidable and ongoing climate change. Climate-resilient investments must be substantially scaled up. Public budgets will not be able to address the adaptation financing challenge alone, financing from the private sector will also be necessary. CLIMATEFIT contributes to bridging the resilience financing gap by providing critical insight and building the capacities of Public Authorities (PAs) to attract and orchestrate various public and private funding & financing sources, and of Financing and Investment Entities (FIEs) to discover and access resilient investment opportunities. CLIMATEFIT will experiment on a mix of 20 territories in Southern, Eastern and Northwestern Europe in their transformational pathways towards climate resilience. The journey will start by taking stock of funding & financing barriers and enablers gathered in the Financing Landscape taxonomy. CLIMATEFIT will create an ingenious Manual for leveraging finance to, 1) co-design 20 innovative investment strategies allowing to identify sources of funding 2) develop 10 credible and scalable investment plans to help better negotiate and articulate financing streams and define investment concepts, and 3) pilot 4 bankable, tailored investment cases. CLIMATEFIT will build a Pathway for FIEs to accelerate finance, test refined methods to reward climate-resilient investment and apply smart adaptation funding and financing solutions. It will establish Local Resilience Taskforces (LRTs) composed of PAs and FIEs that propose a catalytic and systemic approach to resilience financing. Led by WCF, the high-level consortium will build capacity, co-create solutions with PAs and FIEs, and inform EU adaptation and sustainable finance policies. Finally, CLIMATEFIT aims to boost resilience financing in Europe by consolidating the dynamics in LRTs, and to promote and scale its research findings through the European Network of LRTs and its user-oriented One-Stop Shop.