The Minister of Environment and Energy yesterday highlighted the importance of investing in the country’s resilience to climate change, outlining what is being done in this area.
“It is very important for us to invest in giving greater resilience to our territory, to have a territory that is very exposed to climate change, better prepared for winds, floods or fires,” said Maria da Graça Carvalho to journalist at the presentation of the Center for Climate Security and Resilience (CSCR), an initiative of the Faculty of Sciences of Lisbon.
Maria da Graça Carvalho highlighted the importance of the Center in providing data and better modeling tools, which join those that the Environmental Agency already has, and pointed to artificial intelligence and other tools that the faculty uses and that can help the various ministries’ departments in better preparing and forecasting policies to adopt.
The minister said that agencies of the Ministry of Environment and Energy will establish collaboration protocols with the CSCR, which will provide scientific support in areas such as scientific knowledge, data science, advanced modeling, or supercomputing, which will help forecast what will happen and how to respond to climatic events.
“We spent the whole year trying to prepare the country as well as possible for droughts, floods, and strong winds, to protect our coastline, to clean the rivers, to renaturalize the rivers, and renaturalize ecosystems,” said the minister, noting that it was a nationwide effort, with some major projects and large funding.
In the lineup of tasks, she also included the analysis of the number of power lines that should be buried and the start of a plan to acquire renewable generators for parish councils, for the case of a problem such as a blackout.
The CSCR is a national platform that will integrate scientific research, innovation, training, and decision support, reinforcing the capacity to respond to risks associated with climate change.
According to the officials of the Faculty of Sciences, the CSCR aims to establish a permanent platform of cooperation among higher education institutions, public administration, defense and civil protection entities, companies, and international organizations.
It will operate in areas such as risk mapping, the development of monitoring technologies and early warning systems, the protection of infrastructures and ecosystems, the formulation of recommendations for public policies, and the training of professionals and institutions.
