Energy experts and decision-makers from South-Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean met in Vienna on 15-16 October for an OSCE Regional Workshop on "Building Energy Systems Resilience: Science-based Decisions to Face Future Risks and Extreme Weather".
The event equipped participants with detailed long-term climate projection data and practical anticipatory and risk management tools to help make energy systems more resilient to future risks. Senior representatives from ministries of energy and environment, transmission system operators, energy regulators, hydrometeorological services, and academia took part, reflecting the cross-sectoral nature of the project.
"Through this project the OSCE provides critical, high-detail datasets that are essential for long-term energy system planning," said Kliment Naumoski, Advisor and Grid Planning Expert at MEPSO, the Electricity Transmission System Operator of the Republic of North Macedonia. "The new tools, particularly the visualized climate indices, give us clear and practical insights for screening future risks and opportunities for our infrastructure. This workshop was especially valuable as it helped us learn how to read, interpret, and apply these climate datasets directly in our day-to-day energy planning decisions."
Over two days, participants reviewed the findings from the OSCE's downscaled climate-modelling data at a 12 km spatial resolution, covering key energy-relevant indices - such as average temperature rises, consecutive warm and dry days, cooling and heating demand, and precipitation intensity - and explored their implications for energy infrastructure resilience, generation, transmission and demand planning.
Delegates also explored the forthcoming OSCE Energy Security Platform - an online decision support tool that will help energy and climate stakeholders in the beneficiary countries anticipate and prevent multi-dimensional risks while identifying opportunities to enhance energy security and advance the energy transition.
Recognising that energy systems face growing pressures from heatwaves, droughts, flooding, wildfires and shifting resource availability, participants emphasized the need for climate-informed strategies to diversify supply, improve operational robustness and foster cross-border cooperation, and highlighted the key role of the OSCE in making these tools available.
The event was organized by the OSCE Office of the Co-ordinator of OSCE Economic and Environmental Activities in partnership with Argonne National Laboratory, under the OSCE extrabudgetary project Mitigating Climate Change Threats to the Energy Sector in the OSCE Region | OSCE , funded by Austria, Germany, Italy, Poland, and the United States.
