Search

Under the current climate change situation, the Mediterranean region has been identified as one of the primary hot-spots, expecting not only to become warmer, but also drier during the twenty-first century. Changing conditions also include an increase in the frequency of intense torrential rainfall events, whose occurrence has already caused increasing flash flood events with catastrophic impacts and human casualties. The understanding of the past extreme events is challenging and useful to deal with the current situation.During November 1617 an extreme rain event has been documented by previous studies in a large latitudinal region from southern France to eastern river basins of the Iberian Peninsula (Thorndycraft et al., 2006). Here we present new evidences of the large-scale impact of this extreme event based on a multi-proxy approach. On the one hand, the occurrence of this event is interpreted by means of a flood cave horizon detected in a speleothem from Mallorca (Balearic Islands). On the other hand, historical documents depict this event also in some localities of Pyrenees, enhancing its longitudinal occurrence.Through the integration with previous climate, paleohydrological and qualitative hydrometeorological reconstructions, we try to understand the complex atmospheric mechanisms that caused this event during the Little Ice Age.

Coastal Tourist destinations need to adapt to climate variability and change to maintain their tourist competitiveness and appeal. To do this, it is crucial to know the climatic potential of the activities which the destination offers and to manage the location’s natural resources. The Sustainable development goals (SDG) offer guidelines for the development of a tourist destination. In the TURLIT-ODS project, we aim to contribute directly to SDG 3, Good health and well being; SDG 8, decent work and economic growth; SDG 12, Responsible consumption and production and SDG 13, Climate Action.The last decades have seen advances in climate services for multiple fields. Despite this, the determination of the expected optimal days for different nautical sports activities around the central-western Mediterranean has not been done yet.The present research explores, through a co-creation process with local agents, how the atmospheric/oceanic conditions influence nautical sports activity development. With the gained knowledge, we computed the optimal expected days for the specific activities identified by the stakeholders using ocean buoy data and wind and wave data from the SIMAR numerical model owned by Puertos del Estado.Thanks to this approach, we transform raw data into structured information to provide the knowledge of optimal expected days for different nautical sports activities: sailing, stand-up paddling, kayaking, windsurfing, swimming in open waters, diving, snorkeling, water walking, underwater fishing, SUP- yoga, rowing, kitesurfing, surfing, wing foil, jet ski and other recreative uses (like the banana boat).The computation of the optimal days for each one of these activities along Tarragona’s province coast allows us to understand the availability of that conditions and assist decision-making by looking at information that facilitates the definition of diversification strategies of the tourist activities.By considering the meteorological-oceanographical conditions of a territory and, according to the results related to a destination, new tourist products and/or redesigned products offered are depicted. In this way, the destination of Tarragona’s province makes a step closer to the path of the sustainability of their leisure and tourist activities settled on the shore.We acknowledge Diputació Provincial de Tarragona for funding the project TURLIT (T22240S), Puertos del Estado (Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda of Spain), which provided the data for this study, and the Municipality of Calafell for supporting the project and facilitating spaces to generate the co-creation process.

Despite the evidences of the effects of climate change, and the need to adopt adaptation and mitigation measures against its effects, it still exists a significant current of denialism . Radio podcasts, an evolution of classical radio shows, are an interesting communication and leisure tool for disseminating climate misinformation in today's saturated communication world.In the framework of the CLIMACAST: UNDERSTANDING AND EXPOSING CLIMATE MISINFORMATION ON PODCASTS project, we monitor, identify, verify and disseminate short notes to fight this climate misinformation. Currently, the project is in the middle of its execution; and we have monitored monitoring more than a thousand hours of podcasts in Spanish-speaking countries from July to December of 2022. The project, funded by META and Poynter’s International Fact-Checking Network is a joint collaboration between C3/IU-RESCAT/URV, VERIFICAT and Kinzen and Chequeados.The climate misinformation measure unit of this project is a climate claim. A claim is the smallest unit of analysis of verifiable information containing a disputed claim about climate, climate variability and climate change. In addition, to be considered a claim, the information or meaning included in the message should be verifiable content. To track problematic terms, the editors of Verificat monitor podcasts where people post climate disinformation to detect recurring words or phrases in this area to define keywords to find the podcasts. When the podcasts are selected, an artificial intelligence tool transcribes them to a specifically designed dashboard. If it detects problematic content - for example, the word 'calentólogo' (warmist) is typical of negationist slang - the system highlights the keyword for greater detection by analysts. The analyst checks if the keyword refers to some climate and/or meteorological aspect. Then, the analyst determines the content's verifiability based on the message's real climate disinformation. Each claim identified is classified in six main narratives: the main misinformation: climate change does not exist, climate change is not human-caused, climate change is not bad, solutions to face climate change do not work, climate science is not liable and greenwashing.The results show how the claims are regularly identified in regular podcasts. However, it also shows slight growth in the two weeks of COP27.