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This document provides a summary of a hackathon event organized by the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) and Aon, a reinsurance company, to explore the social impacts of climate change. The hackathon focused on developing consistent scenarios for future climate risk, understanding uncertainties in European windstorm modeling, and providing real-time context for extreme weather events. The teams developed tools and methodologies to assess the severity and potential impact of extreme events on insured losses. The collaboration between the MoJ, Aon, and participants from various institutions aims to further research and develop papers and grant proposals in these areas. [Extracted from the article]

Current soil‐ and land degradation seriously challenge our societies; it contributes to climate change, loss of biodiversity and loss of agricultural productions. Yet, soils are also seen as a major part of the solution, if maintained or restored to provide ecosystem services. Climate‐smart sustainable management of soils can provide options for soil health maintenance and restoration. In the European Union, the resource management and sustainability challenge are addressed in the Green Deal that, among other goals, aspires towards a healthy climate‐resilient agricultural sector that will produce sufficient products without damaging ecosystems and contribute to better biodiversity and mitigate climate change. The European Joint Programme (EJP) SOIL was set up to contribute to these goals by developing knowledge, tools and an integrated research community to foster climate‐smart sustainable agricultural soil management that provides a diversity of ecosystem service, such as adapting to and mitigating climate change, allowing sustainable food production, and sustaining soil biodiversity. This paper provides an overview of the potential of climate‐smart sustainable soil management research to the targets of the Green Deal that are related to soils most directly. The EJP SOIL EU‐wide consultation (interviews and questionnaires) and literature analysis (national and international reports and papers) done in the first year (2020–2021) generated a wealth of data. This data showed that there are specific manners to do research that are essential for it to be effective and efficient and that can actively contribute to the Green Deal targets. We concluded that research needs to be: (i) interdisciplinary, (ii) long‐term, (iii) multi‐scaled, from plot to landscape, (iv) evaluating trade‐offs of selected management options for ecosystem services and (v) co‐constructed with key stakeholders. Research on climate‐smart sustainable soil management should be developed (1) on plot scale when mobilizing soil processes and on landscape scale when addressing sediment and water connectivity and biodiversity management; and (2) address the enabling conditions through good governance, social acceptance and viable economic conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The just-ended Sharm El-Sheikh Climate Change Conference in November 2022 brought to light the need to mitigate climate change adaptation related to risk and challenges through Climate financing, has made it very paramount the need to protect fish farmers' investments from climate change-related risk through the development of climate-smart insurance products and covers to help mitigate climate change effects on aquaculturists. As a result, this paper examines aquaculture farmers' preference for climate-smart aquaculture insurance products, challenges of climate-smart aquaculture insurance, and their preferred insurance cover. Survey data was collected from 140 fish farmers and analysed via Multinomial logistic regression, Bivariate Probit regression and Kendall's coefficient of concordance. Climate-Induced Aquaculture Stock Mortality Insurance (CIASMI) was the most-preferred climate-smart insurance product. Insurance Cover for Diseases (ICD) was the least preferred. The results further indicated that membership in a farmer organisation, farm income, credit access, climate-related peril and anthropogenic-related peril had a positive influence, whereas years of education had a negative influence on climate-smart aquaculture insurance participation. Moreover, production system had a negative relationship with mode of participation while number of employees, farm income and climate-related peril influenced mode of participation positively. The results also revealed that age, sex, stock size, awareness, income, climate and environmental-related peril, and anthropogenic-related peril significantly influenced the choice for climate-smart aquaculture insurance products, specifically climate risk related to stock mortality insurance and climate-related to consequential loss insurance. Finally, delay in claim settlement was the most pressing constraint. In contrast, lack of experts in disease diagnosis was the least ranked constraint of climate-smart aquaculture insurance. Therefore, this study provides insights for the Fisheries Commission, Ghana Agricultural Insurance Pool (GAIP), World Cover and other agricultural insurance companies globally to draft climate-smart insurance products for aquaculturists. • Majority of aquaculturists preferred individual aquaculture insurance participation. • Climate -induced aquaculture Stock Mortality Insurance (CIASMI) was the most-preferred climate-smart insurance product, while Insurance Cover for Diseases (ICD) was the least preferred. • Climate related factors had an influence on climate-smart aquaculture insurance participation. • We developed a framework to implement climate smart aquaculture insurance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]