ECMWF launches tender to develop climate risk demonstrator for the European Central Bank
ECMWFEuropean Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts More has opened a tender to develop a new demonstrator that will use the capabilities of the Destination Earth (DestinE) initiative to help the European Central Bank (ECB) assess climate-related risks in the agriculture sector. The work will explore how climate hazards affect agricultural productivity and food prices, supporting potential future service developments tailored to central banking needs.
The demonstrator will be co-designed with experts from the ECB and ECMWFEuropean Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts More through dedicated workshops and stakeholder engagement. It will investigate how extreme weather events—including heatwaves, droughts, floods and compound events—can shape agricultural outcomes and influence food inflation. Recent evidence highlights the scale of these challenges: Europe’s extreme summer heat in 2022 raised food inflation by 0.43–0.93 percentage points, with projections suggesting this could rise by up to 50% by 2035.
The project will draw on DestinE’s Climate Change Adaptation Digital Twin (Climate DT), which produces high-resolution simulations combining global Earth-system models, impact-sector applications and observations. These simulations enable the development of storyline scenarios that explore “what if” climate conditions and their potential consequences for agricultural production and food markets.
Contractors will develop a dataset of agriculture-specific climate risk indicators that integrates high-resolution climate data with regional sectoral information, remote-sensing inputs and socio-economic layers. These indicators will help assess sector vulnerabilities and support the ECB in embedding physical climate risks into financial stability assessments, risk management practices and long-term planning.
Beyond supporting the ECB, the demonstrator will benefit the Network of Central Banks and Supervisors for Greening the Financial System (NGFS). By illustrating how DestinE’s high-resolution data can improve physical risk assessments, the project will contribute to more robust stress-testing frameworks and resilience strategies across the financial system.
DestinE is a European Union-funded initiative launched in 2022 to build a highly accurate digital replica of the Earth system by 2030. It is implemented under the leadership of DG CNECT by ECMWFEuropean Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts More, ESAEuropean Space Agency and EUMETSATEuropean Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological. Strategic access to EuroHPC supercomputers has been granted through a EuroHPC Special Access call.