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Nature-based solutions can protect society from climate and weather extremes, while also delivering a wide range of environmental, social and economic benefits, such as cleaner water, greater biodiversity, recreational spaces and improved human health and well-being. However, these co-benefits are often overlooked because their full value is difficult to assess, which holds back investment and slows their uptake, including by the insurance and financial sectors. So, how can we quantify the value of nature-based solutions beyond risk reduction? A new paper by Andrea Staccione, Almut Arneth and colleagues from the CMCC Foundation and Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam reviews the methods available to assess these co-benefits. 

Jens Krause, KIT

This year we met at Georg-von-Vollmar - Akademie in Kochel am See for our group retreat. 
We discussed the dynamics and organization within our group, learned more about AI tools in science, and found solutions for our group's internal data management. Besides that, we also found some free time to take a walk by the lake.

Egor Vikhrev on Unsplash

Carolina collaborated with colleagues from the Chair for Artificial Intelligence in Climate and Environmental Sciences on a newly published study in Machine Learning: Earth. They benchmarked seven deep learning models against two baseline approaches for next-day wildfire danger prediction in the Mediterranean region. They also applied explainable AI techniques to evaluate whether the models learned physically meaningful wildfire relationships rather than relying solely on predictive accuracy.