Under the overarching policy principle of sustainability, the funding concept pursues the aim of translating existing knowledge of the climate into the solution of application-oriented topics. This includes protection of the climate in the long term, i.e. via the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, but also the protection from the consequences of short-term climate changes and extreme weather events, a theme which has become very topical lately.

Thus, appropriate

strategies for adaptation to climate trends and extreme weather

have to be developed.

Weather and climate play an increasingly important role in various sectors of the economy and society. This has to be taken into account in business management and planning strategies, especially on a regional basis. It must be recognised that the Earth's climate will change in the next decades, both on a global and particularly on a regional scale. It seems to be certain that the mean values of temperature, precipitation and water level will change. The incidence of weather events that are infrequent nowadays, as well as their regional distribution, will probably change. Even if the emissions of greenhouse gases are reduced, there will still be a damaging impact on the ecological and climate system in the future. This is due to the systems slow adaptation processes to greenhouse gas emissions and to their changes. Thus it is necessary to develop strategies to make it possible to adapt to those impacts of global warming that are already known today to be unpreventable. Moreover we already need to be able to adapt better to climate and weather changes on a short timescale. The timely adoption of suitable adaptation measures can not only reduce economic losses but may also give rise to new business opportunities.

BMBF's funding priority Research for Climate Protection and Protection from Climate Impacts aims at several topics, applications and regions in Germany. Keeping this and the long-term need to develop new integrative strategies in mind, a common data base and methodological background for the projects dealing with adaptation processes is needed. This task is addressed by the Service Group Adaptation (SGA).

The objective of the service group is to intensify the transdisciplinary cooperation between climate data users from business and society and from different scientific fields which is inherent in the BMBF'S funding priority Research for Climate Protection and Protection from Climate Impacts. In this context it is crucial that the problems and questions coming from the potential user groups from numerous branches of business and various areas of society are at the centre of future research activities.

One of the SGAs main efforts is to establish a dialogue with the users, who might not be familiar with handling climate models and data. In this respect, it is vital to give advice to the potential users and to raise their level of understanding for the characteristics, performance, power and limits of climate models, data and scenarios. On the other hand, the geosciences are challenged as well to understand the needs of the partners from other disciplines and fields of application and to provide them with specific knowledge and available methodologies. These tasks extend far beyond merely giving data access to the different user groups. They include the development and adaptation of methods to address new topics and the development of new, application-oriented information material.

Thus, the SGA's main task is to define a standardised basis for applied regional modelling (CLM model) as well as for the use of the respective data and to supply it to the users. On this basis the SGA will support and advise the new research projects in BMBF's above-mentioned funding priority with respect to the handling and application of models and data.

The activity of the SGA is supported by a coordinating group, which consists of representatives of the following institutes: the Model and Data group at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, Hamburg, the GKSS research centre, Geesthacht, and the German Meteorological Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst  DWD), Offenbach.

• to carry out workshops and to meet the members of the participating projects in order to assess their needs and to provide support in using the existing resources. Communication deficits between climate modellers, scientists from other disciplines and other climate data users have shown in the past that great care must be taken to make sure that technical terms in the context of climate modelling and climate scenarios are well understood by the potential users as well as by the scientists, in order to avoid misunderstandings.
• to include the data from the routine observations of the Deutscher Wetterdienst as well as observations from other European countries in the model domain in order to make it available to the participating projects.
• to process and consolidate the output of regional climate modelling under the conditions of different climate scenarios and to supply it to the projects in the BMBF funding priority.