After four years of research, collaboration and development, the CoCliCo project (Coastal Climate Core Services) has reached its conclusion. Funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme, CoCliCo set out to tackle one of Europe’s most pressing long-term challenges: helping coastal communities, planners and policymakers understand and prepare for sea-level rise. As the project closes, we want to take a moment to look back at what we built, what we learned, and, most importantly, where everyone can continue to access and build on our work.
The problem we set out to solve
Even if the world meets the Paris Agreement’s mitigation targets, sea levels will still rise by at least 0.3 to 0.6 metres by 2100, and will keep rising for centuries afterwards. This poses a serious risk to the many European settlements, ports and infrastructure networks located along the coast or in low-lying areas. What was missing was an authoritative, pan-European service that could give adaptation practitioners, policymakers, urban planners, infrastructure managers a consistent, science-based view of present and future coastal risk.
CoCliCo was designed to fill that gap.
What we built: the CoCliCo Platform
At the heart of the project is the CoCliCo Platform, an open-source web tool that displays pre-computed maps of current and future coastal risk across Europe. The platform is built around five ready-made User Stories — map-based datasets combining different layers of information to depict specific coastal risk scenarios:
- Inundation distribution during a flood event
- Building exposure
- Projections of exposed people
- Damage costs of exposed infrastructure
- Adaptation based on cost-benefit analysis
These User Stories were shaped directly by user research: policymakers told us they needed clear, actionable data for flood directives; urban planners wanted tools to assess local risk; infrastructure managers were focused on long-term resilience planning. The result is a set of scenario-driven visualisations designed to serve all of these needs at once.
Going further: the Workbench and Exploratory Tools
For users who want to go beyond the platform’s pre-cooked maps, we developed the CoCliCo Workbench — a prototype repository of tutorials and exploratory tools for advanced analysis. It can be used online via Google Colab, or run locally after cloning the GitHub repository.
Building on the Workbench, we developed six Exploratory Tools, described in full in deliverable D2.6, which let users go beyond what the core platform offers:
- Spatial aggregation of platform results to broader scales (NUTS2/NUTS1) instead of the default LAU level
- Damage cost estimation using the user’s own flood hazard raster layers
- Building exposure calculation from custom flood simulations
- Road exposure assessment from custom flood simulations
- Cost-benefit analysis at floodplain scale, including economically optimal adaptation pathways
- Comparison of sea-level rise projections between IPCC’s Fifth and Sixth Assessment Reports
Because these tools are open and reproducible, anyone can create and share their own exploratory notebooks, extending the value of CoCliCo’s data well beyond the lifetime of the project.
Access the User Handbook to get started with the platform, the Workbench, the data catalogue, and full explanations of the data layers and User Stories.
From research to real-world impact
CoCliCo wasn’t just about building a tool, it was about generating the science to underpin it, and testing it in the field. Over four years, the consortium:
- Co-authored policy briefs feeding directly into European and international adaptation debates, including on the timing of a 2-metre sea-level rise, adapting to a changing cryosphere, and the need for transformational adaptation in coastal zones
- Ran demonstration case studies with Champion Users, including an in-depth collaborative exploration of future adaptation in the Fens, England, one of the UK’s most vulnerable coastal lowlands, working alongside partners such as the Environment Agency, Anglian Water, Lincolnshire County Council and the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Combined Authority
- Published a Future Services deliverable (D1.5), setting out how a core service like CoCliCo can support a broader ecosystem of downstream, higher-resolution climate services tailored to specific regions and users
- Aligned CoCliCo with the Copernicus Marine Service and the European Digital Twin of the Ocean (EDITO). Key datasets have already been transferred into EDITO, and a simplified companion tool, the EDITO Coastal Risk Projection application, was showcased at the UN Ocean Decade Conference in 2025, with a direct link back to the full CoCliCo platform
You can find all project deliverables organised by workpackage, and all published research, on our research page.
What happens next
CoCliCo’s four-year funding period is ending, but its legacy is designed to last. Because the platform, workbench and exploratory tools are open-source, they remain available for anyone, researchers, consultants, public authorities, to use, adapt and build upon. The project’s alignment with Copernicus Marine and EDITO also opens a pathway toward a future, more permanent climate service supporting sea-level rise adaptation decisions in Europe.
We won’t be sending regular project updates going forward, but we’ll keep in touch if there’s a major development, such as a new phase of funding to move CoCliCo toward becoming a fully operational service.
Thank you
CoCliCo was only possible thanks to the dedication of a large, multidisciplinary team and the support of our funder, the European Commission (Horizon 2020 grant agreement No 101003598).
Thank you to our partners: BRGM, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki (AUTH), Kiel University, Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS), Deltares, ENEA, Federlogistica, Guerilla Communications, Global Climate Forum (GCF), ICLEI, IHCantabria, LGI, Mercator Ocean International, Sayers and Partners, University of East Anglia, Vizzuality, and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU Amsterdam).
And thank you to our sister projects, SCORE, PROTECT, Adapt4Coast and REST-COAST, for their collaboration throughout.
Finally, thank you to everyone who contributed to CoCliCo over the years, across the core team and all supporting roles, for the science, the code, the outreach and the countless hours that made this project possible.