CROSS-CASCADE Kick-off Meeting: Building the Foundations for Understanding Cascading Climate Impacts
The CROSS-CASCADE COST Action (CA24163) officially launched with a successful and energising kick-off meeting in Brussels, marking the start of a pan-European collaboration focused on one of the most pressing challenges in climate science and policy: cascading climate impacts.
Climate impacts rarely occur in isolation. Extreme events such as droughts or floods can trigger knock-on effects that spread far beyond their point of origin - across sectors, borders, and societies. These impacts can propagate through trade and supply chains, financial systems, migration pathways, and governance structures, creating complex risks that are difficult to anticipate and manage. Understanding these cascading effects is essential if Europe is to design coherent, forward-looking climate adaptation and risk management policies.
CROSS-CASCADE brings together experts from across Europe to address this challenge head-on. The Action is dedicated to advancing cross-sectoral and multi-model approaches to climate impact assessment, with a strong emphasis on extreme events and their transmission pathways. A central goal is to develop common protocols, harmonised datasets, and shared methodological frameworks that allow researchers to consistently analyse how climate impacts interact and cascade across systems.
The kick-off meeting in Brussels laid the groundwork for this collaboration. Participants discussed the scientific scope of the Action, governance structures, and plans for Working Group activities, while also setting a shared vision for how CROSS-CASCADE can bridge the gap between climate impact science and policy needs. The meeting highlighted both the complexity of cascading risks and the clear demand for integrated approaches that move beyond single-sector analyses.
CROSS-CASCADE is chaired by Christopher Reyer, with Laura Dobor serving as Vice Chair, and is supported by an enthusiastic and highly committed network of researchers, practitioners, and policy-relevant experts. Collaboration, openness, and real-world impact are central to the Action’s ethos.
As CROSS-CASCADE moves forward, it aims not only to advance scientific understanding, but also to provide actionable insights that help European societies become more resilient in an increasingly interconnected and climate-stressed world.