Research to application: the evolution of the CREMA Tool across MULTICLIMACT and MedIREN projects for advancing climate resilience in Europe.

Climate change poses growing challenges across Europe, demanding innovative, data-driven systems to translate complex data into practical strategies for resilience planning. This paper showcases the evolution of the Climate REsilience Maturity Assessment (CREMA) tool, developed under MULTICLIMACT project (GA n. 101123538), enhanced with Med-IREN project (GA n. 101157707), to advance the resilience of built environments and infrastructures against climate and natural threats. The CREMA tool integrates deterministic and probabilistic approaches to assess climate change's risks through a structured process that includes hazard and asset characterization, vulnerability analysis, impact quantification. It considers both the actual (AS-IS) and the future (TO-BE) system state, allowing analysis across multiple timescales, spatial scales, performance dimensions for single or multiple hazards. A key feature is the translation of physical damage and secondary impacts, such as disruption and effects on the population, into estimates of economic loss, enabling cost-benefit evaluations and prioritization of resilience measures. Its purpose is to support decision-makers in understanding vulnerabilities and defining adaptation strategies based on resilience metrics. In MULTICLIMACT the tool focused on assessing the resilience of the built environment, from buildings, cultural heritage sites, to urban areas, territories, under multiple hazards. Within Med-IREN, its scope expands to climate-proof Critical Infrastructures in the Mediterranean region, a recognized climate hotspot, covering sectors like transport, energy and addresses emerging threats including wildfires, coastal erosion, etc, going beyond traditional risks. This evolution broadens the tool's capabilities through the integration of Nature-based Solutions, data streams (Earth Observation, in-situ), multi-sectoral resilience analytics. The advancement demonstrates the European context diversity and the CREMA tool's value in terms of scalability and transferability across geographical areas, spatial scales, infrastructural systems, climatic conditions. Through case studies, it progresses from conceptual development to operational deployment, acting as a bridge between research and decision-making to empower stakeholders in developing evidence-based climate resilience strategies.

Keywords: Climate resilience, Multi-hazard assessment, Resilience quantification, Critical infrastructure, Built environment, Decision-support tool, Cost-benefit evaluation.