A tool to communicate economic assessments of regional adaptation strategies: The ToPDAd interactive tool

The EU FP7 project ToPDAd provides a comprehensive assessment of regional, national, and EU-level adaptation needs, strategies and policies. To this extend the project has developed a next-generation tool set by which these strategies and policies can be supported by top-down and bottom-up assessments, with focus on the infrastructure sectors Energy and Transport, as well as Tourism as an example of a potentially climate sensitive important service sector. For the first time, climate scenarios and socio-economic pathways are combined with sector models and macro-economic models in a methodological framework, allowing detailed cost assessments of different adaptation options by integrating top-down macro-economic assessments with bottom-up sector modelling exercises. Within the chosen sectors seven case-themes were selected to illustrate the potential of the ToPDAd toolset. They were selected to cover a broad range of different climate change phenomena and impacts, while the results are also relevant for a larger region or Europe as a whole. The ToPDAd assessment methodology is based on a modelling approach, integrating macro-economic and sector modelling through comprehensive feed-back mechanisms combined with participatory methods like Multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) to be able to soundly include and value multiple and potentially conflicting decision objectives/criteria that need to be evaluated in making decisions.