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SMR NEWS

Cities are coming together to make the journey towards a resilient future

29 May 2018

A new video shows the journey of seven cities towards a resilient future. Climate scenarios of increasing storms, floods and heat waves have lately become a reality and are putting citizens’ health and lives at risk as a result of climate change.

Human-made disasters such as terrorist attacks used to happen every 5 years in European cities and are now occurring several times a year. Local governments need to prepare their infrastructure for the worst in order to protect their communities, but these challenges transcend national borders and city limits.

“We are changing, the cities are changing, the world is changing and we also need to see outside the borders, to learn and to share information. And I think ICLEI is a great opportunity and a great platform for us to do that,” said Silje Solvang, Municipality of Kristiansand (Norway).

Cities need to work together to build a resilient urban environment where their communities can thrive. Kristiansand, along with the cities of Bristol (United Kingdom), Donostia (Spain), Glasgow (United Kingdom), Riga (Latvia), Rome (Italy) and Vejle (Denmark) have worked with research scientists, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability and DIN to co-create and test a Resilience Management Guideline. The Resilience Management Guideline consists of five steps, which cities can follow to integrate resilience into their city planning.

Developing this guideline and the supporting tools has begun a movement to go beyond adapting infrastructure to climate change and spurred cities on towards boosting social cohesion and quality of life as a primary focus of resilience.

“When I initially came to the project it was very much about future proofing places and infrastructure,” said Lucy Vilarkin, city of Bristol. “For me, the emphasis has shifted onto people and organisations, and how we deal with tackling health issues and building healthy organisations.”

For more information, click here.

SMR NEWS

SMR team presents three years of collaborative work at Bonn event

3 May 2018

The cities of the Smart Mature Resilience project met for the closing occasion of SMR’s successful Tier 3 city programme last week in Bonn. While the project began with seven cities as full project partners, an additional seven cities have become active and engaged in the project, many of whose representatives are also active contributors to SMR’s standardization preparation activities.

Cities establish common ground

Giampaolo Tarpignati, Comune di Udine (Italy) represented SMR’s first official Tier 4 city and shared the inspiring story of how even a small municipality can become a local figurehead and can spur its larger-sized neighbour cities to take transformative action on resilience.

SMR’s partner city of Kristiansand (Norway) could identify with Udine’s situation. Silje Solvang, City of Kristiansand (Norway) said, “We are a very small city, we are only 90,000 inhabitants, and to learn and see that other cities have similar challenges and similar obstacles due to law and leadership and politicians: it has been very good for us to know that we're not the only one.”

Marco Cardinaletti, Project Manager, Region of Emilia-Romagna (Italy) shared innovative communication methods to disseminate project results to stakeholders in the fields of adaptation and resilience, including a children’s theatre performance.

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Looking back over SMR’s co-creation practice

The SMR project was conducted according to the principles of co-creation. Discussions throughout the event produced a plethora of understandings and manifestations of this practice. Jose Maria Sarriegi, SMR project coordinator, emphasised the importance of finding balance for a productive co-creation process. On the one hand, he urged researchers to be open to adapting their models to the feedback and needs of end users. On the other hand, he urged end users to understand the benefits of making tools generic and adaptable: “We are creating the tools not just for them but for the whole community.”

From the point of view of cities, co-creation means involving colleagues and stakeholders from inside and outside the municipality, sharing the project outputs with them and feeding their perspectives back into the co-design process. “The most important thing we learned [through the SMR project] is the holistic approach to think resilience. Resilience has not been a familiar term, now it's becoming a familiar term, and it is how to cooperate with internal stakeholders, external stakeholders and how we all together move forward. When you work together and cooperate together, the outcome is resilient,” said Silje Solvang, City of Kristiansand.

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Circle of Sharing and Learning

The project’s dissemination of project outputs to cities has followed a ‘Circle of Sharing and Learning’, whereby additional cities have become progressively involved in the project as it developed. The project began with the three core cities of Donostia (Spain), Glasgow (United Kingdom) and Kristiansand (Norway). These cities tested the project’s tools and are referred to as ‘Tier 1’ cities. The next ‘tier’ of cities; Bristol (United Kingdom), Rome (Italy), Riga (Latvia) and Vejle (Denmark) provided feedback and review to the tool testing process. This group is referred to as ‘Tier 2’. Each ‘Tier 2’ city was paired with a ‘Tier 1’ city, with whom they worked particularly closely.

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“It’s been brilliant working with other European cities… It’s great having the ability to build a strong peer network with our counterparts of the European cities and also to get outside of our comfort zone. You can get very locked into your own way of thinking, a very UK-centric approach, so we’ve been able to widen our perspective and understand the other challenges other European cities are going through. It’s been great working with Donostia, they’re our Tier 2 City, so we’ve got to know a lot of the challenges they’ve got in their city and we’ve had great conversations with them and sharing our learning on resilience,” said Lucy Vilarkin, Bristol City Council.  

The first two tiers were full project partners. Communication and dissemination activities created a third tier of cities in the final year of the project, comprising Athens (Greece), Greater Amman Municipality (Jordan), Greater Manchester (United Kingdom), Malaga (Spain), Malmö (Sweden), Rekjavik (Iceland) and Thessaloniki (Greece). These cities were part of the ‘Tier 3’ and attended three in-person events and a series of webinars. At the in-person events and webinars, Tier 1 and Tier 2 city representatives facilitated and presented the project results, thereby transferring the knowledge they had gained through the project directly to the new cities. These Tier 3 cities signed an official Statement of Commitment to participate in the project.

“We, as the city of Thessaloniki, are very happy to be here, we were also in the event in Brussels a couple of weeks ago,” said George Dimarelos, City of Thessaloniki. “We have a big interest in cooperating and forming a network with other cities… in order to share our experiences and our challenges.”

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The final ‘Tier 4’ is an open-ended group and may encompass cities beyond Europe and beyond the end of the project’s funding period. Helena Perxacs Motgé, Provincial Council of Barcelona (Spain) discussed the opportunities and challenges of the local economy and society to adapt to climate change. As part of her work in the Provincial Council of Barcelona, Ms Perxacs Motgé provides support to a number of municipalities in the province of Barcelona, works with stakeholders to improve local resilience and adaptation, particularly in terms of agriculture, forestry, fishery and tourism in different areas in Catalonia. Ms Perxacs Motgé found that the tools and methodologies developed by the SMR project could be directly applicable for this context, explaining, “It was good to get ideas from the tools and resources developed during the SMR project. We will try to implement and to use those in our project CLINOMICS, and to use these methodologies for the discussions with the stakeholders to increase their resilience and adaptation to climate change.” Udine (Italy) is the first city to return a signed Statement of Commitment to join the Tier 4. 

SMR co-organised the Open European Day at Bonn Resilient Cities, which saw the highest ever attendance and inspiring discussions. As a pre-event to Open European Day, SMR held its Final City Resilience Conference.

A photo gallery of the event is available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/iclei_europe/sets/72157693144111942/.

RELATED NEWS

European cities face more extreme weather than previously thought

21 February 2018

A landmark study shows the impact of flooding, droughts and heatwaves by 2050-2100 will exceed previous predictions. The research is the outcome of the recently-concluded RAMSES project, where ICLEI worked with scientists and cities to deliver evidence of climate change impacts and the costs and benefits of adaptation measures.

Published last week in the academic journal Environmental Research Letters, the study shows:

- a worsening of heatwaves for all 571 cities

- increasing drought conditions, particularly in southern Europe

- an increase in river flooding, especially in north-western European cities

- for the worst projections, increases in all hazards for most European cities

“Although southern European regions are adapted to cope with droughts, this level of change could be beyond breaking point,” Dr Selma Guerreiro, lead author, explains.

European cities will meet at the Open European Day at Bonn Resilient Cities on 25th April 2018 to discuss exactly this objective. ICLEI members Helsinki (Finland), Rome (Italy) and Lisbon (Portugal), identified in the RAMSES study, are front and centre in this initiative. Susanna Kankaanpää, City of Helsinki will exchange with Thessaloniki (Greece) and Paris (France) on climate change adaptation monitoring and evaluation. Pierluigi Potenza, Rome, will discuss Protection of Infrastructure with Bristol, Manchester (United Kingdom) and San Sebastian (Spain). Jose Silva Ferreira (Lisbon) will work with Vaxjö (Sweden) and Enschede (Netherlands) to find solutions for Adaptive Water Management.

For the high impact scenario, 98% of European cities could see worse droughts in the future and cities in Southern Europe may experience droughts up to 14 times worse than today. Lisbon (Portugal) is among the top capital cities for increases in frequency and magnitude of droughts. Of the European capitals, Helsinki (Finland) is among the cities most likely to experience the most extreme rise in flooding. Rome (Italy) is one of the cities likely to see the greatest increase in number of heat-wave days.

“The research highlights the urgent need to design and adapt our cities to cope with these future conditions,” says Professor Richard Dawson, co-author and lead investigator of the study.

Registration is open for Open European Day at https://resilientcities2018.iclei.org/.

SMR NEWS

Planning for flooding, terrorism and disasters in Kristiansand

16 October 2017

“We are creating tools that cities can use to prevent disasters, and to be prepared for when they occur. It is also important that cities learn from each other's experiences, good and bad," said Professor Jose J. Gonzalez, the University of Agder (UiA). He is the acting scientific coordinator for the European-funded research project Smart Mature Resilience, in which the UiA and the Municipality of Kristiansand, along with six other European cities and five research and international institutions, develop models for how cities can prepare for natural disasters such as sea level rise, extreme weather, flooding and landslides, as well as terrorist attacks and major accidents.

Involve more institutions

In several of the models that the crisis management research project has prepared for various disaster scenarios, it is recommended to involve far more institutions, public and private bodies than only emergency services departments and municipalities. "After the flood, it became clear, for example, that locally, we could have involved more volunteer organizations and the general population in general. Experiences from other places have also shown that it can be effective to prepare people for disasters occurring, and to train them into how they should respond, "says Sigurd Paulsen, deputy chief executive officer in Kristiansand Municipality, explaining: "We can warn or prepare people living near vulnerable areas about the risk of flooding, avalanches or acute pollution from a company or similar. The information can go to charity or non-governmental organizations, or directly via text, email or social media. The emergency response manager believes that such information must be targeted and is probably most effective if the recipients perceive a real threat. For example, it may be easier to understand the need for increased preparedness now after a serious flood occurred than a before part of the country was inundated with flood waters.

A broad-researching topic

"The serious flooding this autumn drew attention to the research project, but it's about so much more than just flooding and extreme weather," says Jose J. Gonzalez. “In addition to natural disasters, the research project deals with how cities can prepare and handle conditions such as heatwaves, juvenile delinquency and economic changes.

Several of the models have already been tested and have already achieved good results in cities such as Vejle and Glasgow. In both cities, they have managed to turn economic recession into new optimism and growth, "said Jose J. Gonzalez.

Three of the cities that participated in the research projects, Bristol, Glasgow and Vejle, already began developing resilience ten years ago in order to better cope with unforeseen events. To make this happen, the cities have expanded their cooperation with business, the city's organizations and universities, and have gotten citizens involved in city processes.

"In these three cities, the investment has had positive ripple effects. The cities have managed to turn business downturns to positive growth," says Jose J. Gonzalez.

NOK 45 million

The research project has a budget of €4.6 million or about 45 million kroner. Of this, UiA has 9 million kroner over three years.

"Without being able to answer for the entire organization, I think there can be much to gain for Kristiansand municipality," says Sigurd Paulsen.

Original text: Torbjørn Witzøe, Fædrelandsvennen. Translation: Clara Grimes, ICLEI Europe.

SMR NEWS

Smart Mature Resilience to launch new programme and workshops at Thessaloniki event

9 October 2017

Nine ambitious local governments will join stakeholders from seven European cities in kicking off a new city collaboration programme as part of the Smart Mature Resilience (SMR) project at a Stakeholder Dialogue in Thessaloniki (Greece) on 7 November 2017.

The event will see participating cities sharing and exchanging local government policies and tools for strategically building city resilience. European cities are facing increasingly frequent and intense hazards and risks as climate change and changing social demographics place their critical infrastructures under increasing pressure. Sharing good practices can help them plan ahead for known and unknown shocks and stresses.

As part of the SMR project, three so-called “Tier 1” cities, Glasgow (UK), Kristiansand (Norway) and Donostia/San Sebastian (Spain), have co-developed a suite of tools to support them and other cities in planning, budgeting and identifying replicable policies towards their resilience goals. A second group of “Tier 2” cities, Bristol (UK), Riga (Latvia), Rome (Italy) and Vejle (Denmark), has been closely observing and providing feedback on this process.

At the one-day Stakeholder Dialogue, these cities will share their knowledge of these tools and contextualise them in terms of real policies to a new group of “Tier 3” cities including Amman (Jordan), Athens (Greece), Greater Manchester (UK), Malaga (Spain), Malmö (Sweden), Reykjavik (Iceland), Stirling (UK) and Thessaloniki (Greece). The event will be officially opened by the Mayor of Thessaloniki, Yiannis Boutaris.

Research as part of SMR has found that cities and their critical infrastructure are interdependent, and that cities can help further boost their own resilience by supporting and fostering resilience in other cities. SMR is supporting the potential for replication by working towards international standards in city resilience management.

The first CEN workshop initiated by SMR, spearheaded by German standardisation organisation DIN, CEN WS/88 - Functional Specification for a Resilience Information Portal is underway. Two further envisaged CEN Workshop Agreements, City Resilience Development - Maturity Model and City Resilience Development - Operational Guidance, will kick off in Thessaloniki on 8 November, following the Stakeholder Dialogue. To join the standardization processes, please contact rene.lindner@din.de.

For further information, visit the project website.

SMR NEWS

SMR invites cities to Thessaloniki workshop on strategic resilience planning

18 July 2017

The SMR project has been working for just over two years to develop a suite of tools to help cities enhance their resilience. These tools have been developed in close cooperation between seven partner cities of Glasgow, San Sebastian, Kristiansand, Rome, Riga, Bristol and Vejle, SMR's four university partners, ICLEI Europe and standardization body DIN.

The cities have been working with researchers to develop five strategic support and discussion formats that the cities are using to identify and select policies they should implement to address weaknesses in their resilience management, to develop long-term resilience strategies as well as structures for cross-departmental cooperation outside of the usual 'silos'.

Now that the tools are being finalised, they will be shared with a wider group of cities at a Stakeholder Dialogue event in Thessaloniki, Greece. Three tools are already available to cities: the Resilience Maturity Model, Risk Systemicity Questionnaire and Resilience Engagement and Communication Tool. Two further tools: a System Dynamics Model and a collection of Resilience Policies will be completed before the event.

Registration for the Stakeholder Dialogue will open soon. For more information, please contact clara.grimes@iclei.org.

SMR NEWS

Equipping cities to use the SMR tools: comprehensive stakeholder training

9 June 2017

The Smart Mature Resilience project is undergoing another period of local stakeholder training, where local stakeholders in the core cities of Donostia, Glasgow and Kristiansand are receiving in-depth training on the use of the SMR tools that are being developed at the moment.

The first stakeholder training workshop took place in Donostia-San Sebastian beginning of June 2017, while the next visit is already planned for middle of July in Glasgow. During these trainings, local stakeholders receive training on the use of the System Dynamics Model, which accompanies the Resilience Maturity Model that is already available online.

The System Dynamics Model allows its users, specifically municipal employees and elected officials that are engaged in activities connected to strategic planning and management of the city to train themselves and understand which the main elements of the resilience building process in their city are.

Following the training, a 2-tier webinar will be held, where the tier-2 city of Bristol will be informed on the training activities and results from the city of Donostia, the tool developers of Tecnun, University of Navarra and co-creation partner ICLEI Europe, while they will be able to ask questions and provide feedback on the results. Stay tuned for the webinar announcement or catch up with the results later.

SMR NEWS

Cities and scientists co-create interactive simulation game on first day of SMR Glasgow workshop

17 May 2017

Glasgow City Council welcomed project partners, project cities and local stakeholders to the Lighthouse, Glasgow this morning for the first day of the Smart Mature Resilience project’s review workshop. During the morning session, the partners built on progress made at the project’s recent workshop, where European cities and a group of projects focusing on related topics met to compare tool development and discuss the optimal conditions for developing possible standards for resilience management in cities.

The SMR project is developing a Resilience Management Guideline supported by five tools, which provides a pathway to lead cities towards a more resilient future. Each tool serves a complementary purpose. The Resilience Maturity Model helps cities to identify their level of resilience maturity and helps them to identify policies that would be helpful measures towards resilience-building. The Risk Systemicity Questionnaire can bring together diverse stakeholders in a city to better understand their awareness of risk and the interrelatedness of risk. The Resilience Information Portal can provide useful software to cities, which they can use to make their communication system more resilient.

During the workshop in Glasgow, cities and scientific partners worked closely together to continue co-development of the System Dynamics Model, which is a game-like online learning tool to help strategic managers and other stakeholders involved in budgeting and strategic planning for resilience in cities identify and decide the most efficient and most strategically accurate policies to implement, and the order in which to do this.

The tool functions with an interactive interface, where users input a symbolic budget for resilience development and adjust the proportional investment in different areas regarding resilience for their city. The user can then run simulations of the effects of prioritizing investment in different areas in different order, using the tool as a kind of playground to trial methods of policy prioritization in a safe environment. Intensive collaborative sessions and exercises with TECNUN, University of Navarra and CIEM, University of Agder collected input from the SMR cities of Glasgow, Kristiansand, Donostia, Vejle, Rome, Riga and Bristol to validate the tool and ensure that it is an ideal format for immediate application and use by cities.

A further tool for Resilience Policies will then provide information, examples and case studies of the policies identified through the Resilience Maturity Model and the System Dynamics Model. The workshop will continue tomorrow with sessions hosted by the University of Strathclyde to work with cities on co-developing this tool.

Impressions of the first day are available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/iclei_europe/sets/72157683833382116/with/34331508890/. You can find out more about Glasgow and SMR at http://smr-project.eu/glasgow/.

SMR NEWS

San Sebastian Mayor hails cities as the ideal scale for developing resilience

6 March 2017

Eneko Goia, Mayor of San Sebastian, welcomed the Smart Mature Resilience project to San Sebastian City Hall on 6th March 2017, emphasizing that “cities are the ideal scale for working on resilience”. Resilience-building is crucial to for San Sebastian, as the coastal city is already experiencing the consequences of climate change, particularly flooding. As the mayor joked, “The sea wants to recover all of those places we took in the past!” The project is developing a new Resilience Management Guideline, which helps cities to make the right decisions and policies to build resilience. This guideline is designed to be useable not only by the project cities, but by all European and global cities. Resilient cities support one another and bolster each other’s ability to recover from shocks and stresses.

“We are building the boat and sailing,” in the words of project coordinator Jose Mari Sarriegi, Tecnun, University of Navarra: the project partners, scientists and cities of San Sebastian, Glasgow, Kristiansand, Bristol, Vejle, Rome and Riga collaborate closely on developing the tools. Two of the tools are complete and are now available for use by cities: the Resilience Maturity Model and the Resilience Information Portal . A Risk Systemicity Questionnaire has been developed and tested in cooperation with the project cities, and this will be launched in the coming months.

The final two tools, the Resilience Policies Portfolio and the System Dynamics Model, are currently being developed. The System Dynamics Model is a game-style simulation programme that allows users to explore the effectiveness of implementing different resilience policies, helping to show which kinds of policies should be implemented in which order as the ideal trajectory towards a resilient city. The project partners and stakeholders are working on testing the model during the San Sebastian meeting, following which the tool developers will integrate the feedback gathered into the final, public version of the tool.

For information in Spanish, please see here.

For more information, please see www.smr-project.eu.

SMR NEWS

Cities receive specialist training in the SMR tools

2 February 2017

Smart Mature Resilience is undergoing an intensive period of local training, where local stakeholders in the core cities of Donostia, Glasgow and Kristiansand are receiving in-depth training on the use of the SMR tools that have been developed so far.

Training visits began in January 2017 in Donostia, where local stakeholders received training on the use of the Risk Systemicity Questionnaire and the Resilience Information and Communication Portal. Following the training, a 2-tier webinar was held, where Tier 2 city of Bristol heard from the city of Donostia, the Risk Systemicity Questionnaire tool developers at Strathclyde and co-creation partner ICLEI a summary of the results of the training, asked questions and provided feedback on the results.

The process continued this week in Kristiansand, where stakeholders received training on the Resilience Information and Communication Portal and provided input for a webpage on Kristiansand via the tool. Training is currently continuing in Kristiansand on the Resilience Maturity Model. Following training in Kristiansand, Tier 2 partner Vejle will attend a webinar to receive a summary of the results, provide feedback and gain an insight into the outcomes of the training.

Training will continue next week in Donostia on the Resilience Maturity Model, followed by Risk Systemicity Questionnaire training in Kristiansand and accompanying webinars, before Glasgow completes the last phase of the training on all three tools.

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This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 653569.