The Slovakian capital of Bratislava is fast becoming a climate change adaptation champion for its local region. Through the RESIN project, Bratislava has begun to take an active role in developing and testing tools for adaptation planning. Specific conditions in Bratislava, such as climate change impacts, drivers, stressors and adaptation options, call for tailored outputs and tools, and the city is an active contributor to producing these resources. Crucial to the development process is the close relationship between cities: pilot cities in RESIN work closely together to share their experience and to share this with a wider circle of Tier 2 cities.

Such a city exchange took place as a knowledge transfer workshop held last month in Bratislava. The cities of Greater Manchester and Bratislava in collaboration with TNO, Tecnalia, Frauenhofer and ICLEI welcomed representatives of 10 RESIN Tier 2 cities to Bratislava from 13-14 June 2017. City governments and representatives from Ghent, Lahti, Covasna, Burgas, Reykjavik, Sfantu Gheorghe, Vilnius, Radom, Nijmegen and Newcastle met their Tier 1 partners in Bratislava for a 2-day knowledge transfer workshop at Faculty of Natural Sciences, Mlynská dolina, Bratislava.

During the workshop, the cities provided feedback on the RESIN vulnerability and risk assessment tool, IVAVIA. Bratislava has already developed two impact chains for “Health and wellbeing of the urban population” and “Green infrastructure” and has previously carried out vulnerability assessment. The city stakeholders were able to draw from this experience to provide tool developers with feedback on the prototype IVAVIA. Bratislava has been closely involved in the vulnerability analysis process and assessment of climate change risks. Through regular Skype meetings with RESIN research partner, Fraunhofer, the city is focusing on the process of involving stakeholders and collecting data.

Mapping and understanding vulnerability and risk is becoming increasingly important to Bratislava. The city has been facing a rapid increase in tropical nights with maximum temperatures of over 20 degrees Celsius. These hot nights have boomed in number from less than 5 in 1990 to 48 hot nights in 2013, and the trend is increasing every year. Thermovisual scanning clearly shows the benefit of green spaces and urban water features for cooling down urban areas and controlling these extreme nighttime temperatures. Local measures for adapting to this new climate reality such as green and blue infrastructure will be essential if Bratislava’s citizens are to get a good night’s sleep.

Bratislava became a pilot project of RESIN: Climate Resilient Cities and Infrastructures in 2015. Since then, it has also joined the core group of cities supporting the new Urban Water Agenda and hosted Bremen (Germany) and Arnhem (Netherlands) as part of the Mayors Adapt City Twinning Programme. In April 2017, the City parliament endorsed the “Action Plan for adaptation to climate change in Bratislava.”

The city’s next ambition is to support the usage of RESIN outputs and tools through translation into Slovak, to raise awareness of the benefits of climate change adaptation through boosting communication and stakeholder involvement, and finally, Bratislava aims to gain political commitment in order to be able to implement the results of the vulnerability assessment in the city’s master plan and urban development scenarios.

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Many European cities are experiencing extremely high temperatures this summer – a trend that municipalities are accepting will continue. According to findings by RAMSES researchers, there will be 10 times more heat wave days from 2081-2100, reaching nearly 30 heat wave days per year on average.

A study by RAMSES related to the 2003 heat wave in France found that while heat waves coincided with an increase in deaths in small towns, Paris, as a major city, suffered nearly three times the number of additional deaths during heat waves.

Why do cities tend to be warmer than their rural surroundings? Firstly, there are more buildings and soil sealing: buildings store heat during the day and release them at night. Walls cause additional radiation as they reflect the sun’s rays and reduce ventilation in narrow streets. Secondly, cities cool less due to less vegetation in city centres causing lower evaporation levels. Thirdly, humans create additional heat, such as through vehicle exhaust. The maps produced following a study in Antwerp and 101 other European cities show where in cities the highest temperatures are occurring and which areas should be prioritised for adaptation measures.

The project found that a typical western European city has a mean temperature difference at midnight of around 4oC . City temperatures on hot summer nights are 8oC -10oC higher than rural areas, as a result of less ventilation and higher populations. The RAMSES project is now completing its fifth year working with cities to promote adaptation, mitigation and sustainable development. The project is currently holding a series of free webinars, which will continue on 13 July.

For more information and to register, click here.

The RESIN project is developing an e-Guide, which is an online platform designed to provide decision support for climate change adaptation planning by city administrators. It does this by:

• Providing a structured and comprehensive overview of the various steps and activities that an urban adaptation process consists of;

• Providing practical, user-oriented support to actually perform such an adaptation process;

• Providing a portal to the most relevant sources of information and supporting methods available on the web, including the provision of new tools and methods that are currently not available;

• Providing guidance (where attainable) for choosing the best approaches, methods, tools and information sources for particular situations and particular steps;

• Providing references to evidence based information;

The development of the e-Guide has just entered a new phase. The high-level design has been finished, and is recorded in an extensive document. It describes the functions of e-Guide, its intended use, its encompassing components and how they work together. It also gives the requirements for development and describes the development and test plan.

This means that the project will now focus on the development of the e-Guide, define how it will work, what it should look like and how it will interact with the user. This work is currently being undertaken in WP6. The first mock-up versions of the e-Guide have been shown to the consortium in the Manchester GA meeting of 9 May. A process to verify and enhance these designs with potential users is currently being undertaken.

Open European Day at Bonn Resilient Cities will bring European cities together to discuss their common challenges and share their successful solutions in a uniquely interactive event that sees cities taking centre stage and sharing cases from their most recent experiences in a conversational format. Innovation, co-creation and transformation in cities are the event’s three main themes and will frame the opening plenary and the break-out sessions. During the plenary, organizers ICLEI Europe and the European Environment Agency will open the day with the European Commission’s DG Research and DG CLIMA, the European Investment Bank, the Committee of the Regions and with the participating cities.

The event will include the OED Marketplace, where participants can share, display and discuss their latest ideas and results. The Marketplace will feature a Road to Adaptation Wall, an Adaptation Poetry Slam, where participants can present their organization or project in super-fast elevator pitches, and the day will finish with a musical exploration of the Sound of Adaptation.

The Open European Day programme is made up of interactive workshops where cities present a real-life challenge and explore solutions to these challenges with participants. On the topic of innovation, EASME and the European Commission will hear examples from Berlin Moabit and Valladolid on using technology for innovating adaptation. Ingrid Coninx (Wageningen University) and the European Investment bank will frame a discussion between Raffaella Gueze, City of Bologna and José Ferreira, City of Lisbon about innovative financing for climate adaptation, and Guimarães (Portugal) will share its experiences with innovation in multi-purpose nature-based solutions.

On the topic of co-creation, Athens (Greece) and the European Environment Agency will contribute on citizens as drivers of change, Peter Massini (City of London) will talk about adaptation and social inclusion and a discussion on co-creation with research and business will bring together contributions by Alistair Ford (University of Newcastle), Marjorie Breyton (Life DERRIS Project) and examples by the city of Vagos (Portugal), Valka (Latvia) and Exeter (UK).

Bratislava (Slovakia) and next year’s European Green Capital of Nijmegen (Netherlands) will share their impressions of how transformation manifests in a physical sense in their cities, facilitated by Birgit Georgi (Physical City Adaptation). The PLACARD project, the Provence of Potenza and the City of Vejle will explore how adaptation relates to the other urban development agendas, and a final Covenant of Mayors session on city transformation through administration will include contributions by Bilbao (Spain) and Copenhagen (Denmark).

Attendance at the Open European Day is free of charge to cities and registration is open at https://fs8.formsite.com/iclei12/form92/index.html. A draft programme is now available on the Bonn Resilient Cities website at http://resilientcities2017.iclei.org/open-european-day/.

On April 4, 2017 RESIN project partners Bratislava City and Comenius University (UNIBA) hosted a workshop aimed at drafting initial impact chains in order to start the assessment of vulnerability of the city and its infrastructures to the impacts of climate change. Throughout the preparation of the meeting, RESIN Partner and leader of WP2, Fraunhofer, helped and guided the City partners in order to harmonise the workshop with past workshops, which have already taken place in Bilbao or Manchester.

The meeting was thematically broken down into two sessions. The morning session focused more on urban population and the impacts of climate change on health and quality of life. The second (afternoon) session focused on green infrastructure: as a critical infrastructure, sensitive to climate change on hand a being a an important factor in adaptation and mitigation on the other. The associated climate change risks were pluvial flooding and heatwaves for the urban population and droughts in relation to green infrastructure. Altogether, 16 stakeholders joined the meeting; spatial planners and environmental managers as well as external stakeholders; representing social care and care for elderly and the Slovak hydrometeorological institute.

As part of the discussion, the point was raised of out how the results of vulnerability assessments can be utilised in terms of urban planning and prevention risk resulting from climate change risks. The outcomes of the meeting are currently being analysed, and further meetings are planned to engage further city stakeholders.

As European citizens enjoy the first sunny days of spring, city planners and climate experts reflect on last winter’s flooding and storms and consider the heatwaves that are likely to hit European cities this summer. Open European Day at Bonn Resilient Cities will bring European cities together to discuss their common challenges and share their successful solutions in a uniquely interactive event that sees cities taking centre stage and sharing cases from their most recent experiences in a conversational format. Innovation, co-creation and transformation in cities are the events three main themes for the event and will frame the opening plenary, facilitated by organizers ICLEI Europe and the European Environment Agency, and with contributions by the Committee of the Regions, DG Clima, DG Research and the European Investment Bank.

The event will include interactive workshops where cities will present a real-life challenge and during the workshop, participants will explore solutions to these challenges. On the topic of innovation, participants will discuss examples from Bologna (Italy) and Lisbon (Portugal) of innovative financing for climate adaptation and Guimarães (Portugal) will share its experiences with innovation in multi-purpose nature-based solutions. On the topic of co-creation, Athens (Greece) will contribute on citizens as drivers of change, Greater London (UK) on adaptation and social inclusion and Vagos (Portugal), Valka (Latvia) and the Life DERRIS project will discuss co-creation with research and business.

Bratislava (Slovakia) and next year’s European Green Capital of Nijmegen (Netherlands) will share their impressions of how transformation manifests in a physical sense in their cities, and a final Covenant of Mayors session on city transformation through administration will include contributions by Bilbao (Spain) and Copenhagen (Denmark).

Attendance at the Open European Day is free of charge to cities and registration is now open. A draft programme is now available on the Bonn Resilient Cities website at http://resilientcities2017.iclei.org/open-european-day/.

In their endeavours to increase the climate resilience of cities, urban administrators, planners and decision makers have to deal with considerable uncertainty and complexity. The effects of climate change in terms of the impact of extreme weather events and the frequencies and intensities with which they occur are uncertain. Consequences in terms of associated risks to cities, for their infrastructures and inhabitants, depend very much on preparations that cities have in place or are planning for, to cope with these phenomena. Moreover, uncertainties arise from cascading effect, due to (un)foreseen relations between different urban areas, stakeholders or adaptation measures.

Despite these considerable uncertainties, decision makers have to act. Although the terms uncertainty, risk management and complexity are widely used in the policy making domain, there is little appreciation for the fact that there are many different dimensions of uncertainty, and there is a lack of understanding about their different characteristics, relative magnitudes, and available means of dealing with them. This results in cities experiencing difficulties in how to deal with uncertainty and complexity, which nevertheless must be acknowledged and integrated into

policy making for the future.

RESIN has produced a document that aims to break down complexity and uncertainty into understandable definitions and aspects in the context of urban climate resilience. This improves the ability of linking methods and instruments to deal with complexity and uncertainty with the particular challenges that arise. Climate change policies in general are very reliant on uncertainty management. This means that the choice of

risk and uncertainty management strategy should be carefully weighed against the particular “uncertainty or complexity challenge” that is at stake. This effort should be seen as the starting point of addressing the issues of uncertainty and complexity in the RESIN project. It provides city planners in general with an overview of methods and tools they can use to handle complexity and uncertainty. The methods and instruments presented in this report will be selectively discussed and applied within the RESIN cities.

RESIN’s new risk-based vulnerability assessment tool named ‘IVAVIA’ has been tested in Bilbao and Greater Manchester

The overall aim of a risk-based vulnerability assessment using IVAVIA is to facilitate the understanding of cause-effect relationships of climate change and to assess what impact on people, economy and built-up area under study can be expected now and for the future due to the changing climate. It enables the identification of geographical vulnerability hotspots, which can be used as an entry-point for adaptation measures. The identification of these hotspots will enable prioritizing the areas where actions are needed first.

IVAVIA is a procedure with 9 modules based on the 8 modules of the GIZ Vulnerability Sourcebook.

The application of IVAVIA is embedded in a larger cycle of repeated risk-based vulnerability assessment (IVAVIA), identification of adaptation options, adaptation planning, and implementation (RESIN conceptual framework). IVAVIA starts with preparatory work in module 0. The modules 0-2 have been applied to Bilbao and Greater Manchester so far. Other RESIN cities such as Bratislava will follow in early 2017.

Intermediate results of this activity are a set of impact chains. Modules 3–7 are currently under development, with a focus on estimating risk. After the application of module 8, participating cities may end up with an interactive map about their respective city exposed to a hazard of their choice.

Read more at http://www.resin-cities.eu/resources/tools/ivavia/.

Cities are invited and encouraged to provide their feedback on the tool via the RESIN LinkedIn group.

The Bercy-Charenton urban project has been chosen to co-create and test the Adaptation Option Library developed by TECNALIA in the WP3 of RESIN. Located in the south-east of inner Paris, the Bercy-Charenton area covers around 70 hectares south of the 12th district. Surrounded by the Seine and heavy infrastructure (railways, ring road, and interchange of the A4), the area is facing many challenges such as reducing air and noise pollution issues and creating linkage between isolated areas. Through this urban project, the City of Paris aims to turn the site “from an industrial landscape into a new and integrated piece of city fabric”.

The RESIN project aims to help the City of Paris to find the best adaptation options regarding fluvial and pluvial flood risk, heat waves and drought on this site, where development work of public spaces and housing construction should take place from 2018 to 2030.

The first round of meetings for this case study will start in March 2017, and will involve RESIN partners (EIVP, TECNALIA, ICLEI), the urban project manager, the manager of the adaptation strategy of the City of Paris and the Chief Resilience Officer and its team. One of the objectives of the case study is benchmark different alternative designs. The meeting will serve to define together the criteria to be considered for the selection of the adaptation options and discuss the resulting list of adaptation options and the extracted information.

DARWIN is developing resilience management guidelines which will improve responses to expected and unexpected natural and man-made disasters. The DARWIN Resilience Management Guidelines (DRMG) consist of a set of principles, methods, practices and strategies to aid organisations in the creation, assessment or improvement of their own guidelines. Based on resilience management concepts, the guidelines help the organisation in developing a critical view of its own crisis management activities. They are intended to complement existing guidelines, procedures and practices already present in an organisation.

Expert input and feedback is key to ensuring the DRMGs are practical and relevant to resilience and crisis management practitioners. DARWIN is fostering a community who can contribute their expertise to the development of the DRMGs to ensure they are of use to practitioners. The DARWIN Community of Practitioners (DCoP) interacts with the DARWIN team on a regular basis in order to provide their reactions and advice on the development of the DRMG.

DARWIN and the DCoP cooperate online at regular webinars, and face-to-face at annual DCoP workshops. At the most recent webinar, in November 2016 DARWIN partners presented the most recent developments of the DRMG; a set of concepts cards which assists organisations in assessing their resilience.

The next DCoP meeting will take place from the 28th to the 29th of March in Sweden. The workshop will focus on case studies that will be used for evaluation and piloting of the DRMGs, and simulation and training materials for use of the DRMG. The workshop will also collect feedback on the guidelines, as well as seek perspectives on how they can be improved and optimised.

To find out more about the next DCoP workshop, please see here: http://www.h2020darwin.eu/news/project-news/84-darwin-workshop-march-2017

If you would like to register for the workshop please contact: rebecka.forsberg@regionostergotland.se