What is the CROSSEU Decision Support System?

CROSSEU Decision Support System

The CROSSEU Decision Support System (DSS) is being developed to provide an accessible, scientifically robust, and stakeholder‑driven platform for understanding climate risks and supporting equitable adaptation planning across Europe. It brings together climate science, socio‑economic analysis, and participatory co‑design to generate actionable insights for decision‑makers at regional and local scales.

The CROSSEU DSS comprises of several components:

• A back-end platform to host software and data in the Integrated Assessment Framework on DAFNI, the Data & Analytics Facility for National Infrastructure at UK Research and Innovation (UKRI)
• A front-end user interface, Teal, from the World Energy and Meteorology Council (WEMC), an online application developed through co-production with stakeholders
• The results from the CROSSEU project case studies, socioeconomic modelling and policy reviews

Built on DAFNI and Teal foundations

The back-end power of the DSS, DAFNI, provides a secure, cloud-based platform for hosting CROSSEU datasets and executing computational models, such as economic and biophysical impact models. By running these models in containerised environments on DAFNI's dedicated servers, the DSS can process, standardise, and query complex data behind the scenes. This robust infrastructure ensures that the DSS is not only highly stable and secure but also optimised for long-term public availability and scalability.

The DSS interface builds on the long-established Teal tool, developed by WEMC over several major European and international projects. Teal began under the Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) Climate and Energy Education Demonstrator and was completed as part of the H2020 SECLI‑FIRM project, with further enhancements under the H2020 FOCUS‑Africa project. It provides a mature foundation that combines a solid and extensible database architecture, advanced automated processing routines, and a user-friendly visual interface. Its database structure is built on an extended SQL implementation, supported by a rigorous data management plan refined over many years. Teal already includes a range of modules, including publicly available historical and projection data and representations of socioeconomic and climate risk indicators. A key strength of Teal is its capacity to operate on multiple spatial scales and combine visualisation, data and interpreted information downloads.

Crucially, in addition to hosting the CROSSEU IAF, the interactive frontend Teal visualisation instances themselves are hosted directly within the DAFNI infrastructure. This unified hosting ensures that the entire system is highly stable, secure, and optimised for long-term public availability and scalability.

These capabilities make these tools ideal for the development of the CROSSEU DSS.

What the final DSS will enable

The CROSSEU DSS is designed as an interactive platform that guides users through understanding and assessing climate risks relevant to their region or sector of interest. Users will be able to choose from two pathways, the first to explore and compare information across regions, asset types, hazards, and other characteristics giving impact results for multiple regions, scenarios or future periods. The second is to use narratives to guide the user through appropriate choices to produce insights from an engine populated with climate and socioeconomic data and policy input from CROSSEU case studies and assessments.

Users can generate downloadable briefs summarising the findings and information on policy actions, tailored to the options they select.

Co‑designed with stakeholders

A feature of the CROSSEU DSS is its collaborative development approach. The system is co‑designed with stakeholders from the project’s case studies, ensuring that it reflects real‑world decision contexts and practical needs. Through this approach, the DSS aims to deliver information that is understandable, policy relevant, and aligned with users’ workflows.

The DSS user interface is designed to combine three major components:

1. A user selection menu for selecting region of interest, configuring variables such as hazard type and asset characteristics.
2. Visualisation and communication functions, including downloads and autogenerated summary briefs.
3. User narrative pathways for policy-relevant information drawn from policy evaluation insights and user-driven stakeholder scenarios.

Future development

As the CROSSEU project progresses, the DSS will expand to include all case studies, policy and other supplemental information covering multiple sectors and regions. Future enhancements will increase interactivity, improve indicator selection through user-driven pathways, and incorporate iterative feedback gathered through participatory engagement processes. The aim is to create an accessible, and equity‑focused tool supporting climate‑resilient policy‑making across Europe.