The SMR project team has received first prize at two award ceremonies this month for its innovative and effective standardisation activities. On 13 November 2019, the team was awarded the CEN-CENELEC Standards + Innovation Award at an award ceremony in Brussels. The project’s scientific coordinator Jose Julio Gonzelez accepted the award on behalf of the project partners.

CEN and CENELEC’s Standards+Innovation Awards acknowledge the important contribution of research and innovation to standardization and celebrate the contributions of researchers, innovators and entrepreneurs to standardization. The European Committee for Standardization (CEN) and the European Committee for Electrotechnical Standardization (CENELEC) are two of the three officially recognized European Standardization Organizations.

The previous week, Holger Robrecht, Vasilis Latinos and Clara Grimes were awarded the DIN Innovators Award 2019 for their work on standardisation as part of the SMR at a ceremony in Berlin (Germany). The award ceremony was held on 7 November and was organised by the Deutsches Institut für Normung (DIN), which is the German national organisation for standardisation.

The annual DIN Innovators Award is open to initiators of standardisation activities in which research results have been transferred to the market, or who have supported the launch of a new product or service. The award aims to highlight the relevance of standardisation on innovations’ long-term success and to recognise the achievements of experts and initiators in this area.

Due to a high degree of competence both in standardisation and in the topic of urban resilience, as well as an open and collaborative process adapted to the needs and conditions of local governments, SMR carried out led an exceptionally successful standardisation process resulting in three new pre-standardisation documents that focus on City Resilience Development and contribute to standards at the international ISO level. The CEN Workshop Agreement titled CWA 17300 City Resilience Development – Operational Guidance defines an operational framework for cities, provides guidance on local resilience planning and supports their efforts in building resilience. The CWA 17301 Maturity Model allows evaluation of cities’ resilience performance, and the CWA 17302 Information Portal serves as a reference including information on cities’ local resilience.

The project, a Horizon 2020 Success Story, was also noted for the inclusion of a large number of project-external cities and experts in the standardisation process.

Holger Robrecht, Deputy Regional Director of ICLEI Europe said, “we celebrate this award for Jose Maria Sarriegi of the Technical University of Navarra, coordinator and mentor of SMR, who passed away much too early. It will be his legacy to help as many cities as possible raising their resilience bar and supporting life-quality and security of people in Europe and elsewhere.”

The SMR project has been profiled on the European Commission website as a 'success story'.

European cities face increasing hazards and disaster risks from extreme weather, terrorist attacks and insecurity. An EU-funded research project has provided guidelines and tools for cities to learn and share experiences and become better, more resilient places to live.

Cities throughout the world are changing both socially and demographically. Climate change provokes extreme weather such as storms, floods and heatwaves, while terrorist attacks, which previously happened every few years in European cities, can now occur several times a year.

As well as the human benefits, investing in resilience can lead to significant cost savings when disasters are averted entirely or are well-handled, enabling cities to recover quickly and core operations to continue without major disruption.

Researchers and cities worked together under the EU-funded Smart Mature Resilience (SMR) project to enhance the capacity of cities to resist, absorb and recover from the threats and trends that lead to social, infrastructural, environmental and economic challenges.

‘More than half the population of the word is currently living in cities,’ says project coordinator Jose Maria Sarriegi of the University of Navarra, Spain. ‘A proactive approach to resilience can generate wide-reaching benefits across social, environmental and economic systems in cities and make them a better place to live.’

Raising awareness

Cities agree that managing resilience is necessary but lack the tools to build awareness which leads to better resilience. SMR has produced an online toolkit and provides guidance to cities and local authorities that allows them to assess and strengthen their resilience.

One of the most innovative aspects of the project was the participation of cities in co-creating these tools, which were tested and then refined according to feedback from city stakeholders.

For example, a questionnaire helped cities to assess their exposure to various risks and indicated their level of awareness of risk and where they should prioritise their efforts. A number of cities and local practitioners took part in pilot studies to test, validate and review the resilience management guidelines and tools. These formed an integrated management prototype for resilience planning that can be transferred to other cities and regions.

Those cities taking part acknowledged that their administrations tend to be fragmented, based on departments working on single issues, such as climate change, social affairs, civil protection or mobility. The SMR project provoked more interaction in efforts to build resilience strategy across departments and prompted cities to adapt and revise the tools for immediate use in their own resilience planning.

Preparing for the unknown

‘Resilience supports livelihoods, improves life quality and reduces poverty,’ says Sarriegi. ‘Planning for resilience and anticipating risks at various levels of government is essential to ensure the ongoing operation of critical infrastructure and social services, and arrive at solutions in the case of a crisis.’

As well as leading to better internal communication between municipal departments, the project’s co-creation strategy was found to improve communication between the city and private-sector stakeholders, leading to greater trust and transparency and improved intra-city relationships. Some of the project results will also be translated into European or national standards.

The SMR website offers the resilience management guidelines comprising five tools and a user manual to help city planners prepare for the unknown. The project has also helped to create a support network for Europe’s cities to help one another overcome future challenges.

Just days after the IPCC published its Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C, setting a new urgency for climate action within the next 12 years, the RESIN team gathered in Brussels for the project's final event. Effective climate action is a long term proposition, demanding cooperation and knowledge sharing across disciplinary and geographical borders. The RESIN project has progressively added to its network throughout the project, added 17 cities to its ‘Circle of Sharing and Learning,’ and included many more colleagues and peers in its collaborative community. For the final conference, the team invited three other Horizon 2020-funded projects to collaborate on the event “Climate Resilient Cities and Infrastructure 2018”: two ongoing projects, RESCCUE and BRIGAID, and a third that has been recently completed: EU-CIRCLE. All four projects are linked by a common concern for building climate resilience in European cities. Not only was this an occasion to share the findings of the RESIN project, but also to help establish a legacy for the work to date, and to explore new avenues to carry it forward. Over 100 people took part in the event, many of them representing municipalities that it is hoped will take up the RESIN tools in their day-to-day work. When it started in 2015, the RESIN project sought to address the following broad issues:

1.     Cities were in need of decision support tools for climate adaptation planning

2.     Risk assessment was not comparable between cities in Europe

3.     No standardised collection of adaptation options was available

These were reflected on in the opening plenary discussion, where the project’s key outputs were introduced by RESIN research partners and a representative from the City of Ghent, who has followed the project as part of the RESIN ‘Circle of Sharing and Learning’. The audience also heard from Arnoldas Milukas (Head of Unit, H2020 Environment and Resources, EASME), Peter Bosch (RESIN project coordinator, TNO), Marc Velasco (Aquatec – SUEZ Advanced Solutions, RESCCUE project) and Ingrid Konrad (Chief City Architect, City of Bratislava).

“The RESIN project provides us with international know-how. Adopting the Adaptation Options Library was welcomed as a modern tool for city planning, its test version online is already available in the Slovak language and will be made available to the public within the framework of the RESIN project.” - Ingrid Konrad (Chief Architect, City of Bratislava)

Two blocks of parallel sessions then explored these outputs in greater depth: the urban adaptation e-Guide, the European Climate Risk Typology, the IVAVIA impact and risk assessment methodology, and the Adaptation Options Library. One session titled ‘Find the gaps: Where will adaptation research go from here?’ looked towards the future research landscape, with potential directions identified being more meaningful climate impact indicators at the city scale and improved multi-level governance. A stronger focus on action-oriented research approaches involving social scientists could support such an agenda.

In the closing discussion, project coordinator Peter Bosch (TNO) noted that international policy frameworks and local action are moving closer together. While at the beginning of RESIN many people working in cities seemed not to know what the Sendai framework was, “now, on a very practical level, people are realising that there is the need to link the energy transition to climate adaptation and on the city level to translate the SDGs to something tangible.”

A photo gallery of the event is available on Flickr. A full report on the final conference is available on the RESIN website.  

How do you plan for the unknown? Cities are one of the top contributors to climate change worldwide, and they are also the areas hit hardest by the extreme weather, pressure on infrastructure and unpredictable disasters triggered by the changing climate.

Four cities, Bilbao (Spain), Bratislava (Slovakia), Greater Manchester (United Kingdom) and ICLEI Member Paris (France), have been working with researchers and ICLEI Europe since 2015 to develop new methods to adapt to climate change. These cities have gone beyond reacting to the effects that we are seeing across Europe: brown parks, water shortages and shocking storms, and are planning for long-term uncertainty decades in advance.

At “Climate Resilient Cities and Infrastructures 2018”, which will take place 9 October 2018 in Brussels (Belgium), the cities will share the results of their brand new co-developed tools, including an e-Guide to adaptation strategy development, a methodology for vulnerability and risk assessment, a map-based typology of climate risk in European regions and a library of adaptation options.

“The Adaptation Options Library is an easy-to-use and educational tool for both developing an adaptation strategy and implementing it. On the one hand, it can be used by practitioners such as architects and landscape planners for different small-scale projects (at the building level), and on the other, by urban planners and resilience officers to design an adaptation strategy and select the right measures,” said Eva Streberova (City of Bratislava). Ingrid Konrad, Bratislava’s Chief Architect, will speak about the city’s climate adaptation progress through the RESIN project.

Interactive sessions will guide local governments to forge new partnerships based on common climate risk characteristics, and will offer research scientists a space to plan future research into climate change adaptation.

The conference is co-organised by the RESCCUE project and will feature project coordinator Pere Malgrat (Aquatec - SUEZ Advanced Solutions). A closing panel including Aleksandra Kazmierczak (European Environment Agency) and Roger Street (Environmental Change Institute, University of Oxford) will consider the policy implications of cities’ need for meaningful climate adaptation action.

The conference is free of charge and registration is open until 2 October 2018. For more information, click here.

Over 70 participants, including representatives of at least 20 local and regional governments, met in Bilbao (Spain) on 5th July 2018 for the second Stakeholder Dialogue of the RESIN project. Bilbao is a core RESIN city and has also been collaborating closely with the Basque Government on climate change adaptation measures. Deputy Mayor and Councillor for Mobility and Sustainability for the City of Bilbao, Alfonso Gil, welcomed the participants who had travelled to his city from across Spain and Europe, and as far away as Melbourne.

Speakers from the Basque Government emphasised how important it is to communicate with municipalities. “They need to let us know what we can help them with,” said María Aranzazu Leturiondo, Deputy Minister of Territorial Planning.

Susana Ruiz, Urban Planning Technician, City of Bilbao called for regulation to support municipalities in their adaptation work: “I would like to make a call to the authorities: It would be wonderful to have supra-municipal regulation from the autonomous region or from the state.”

For Aitor Zulueta, Director of Natural Heritage and Climate Change, “Adaptation to climate change is avoiding risks. It is a tool to anticipate economic problems… We need to adapt ourselves to avoid these kinds of risks, like the landslide in Bizkaya.” Intense rainfall triggered a landslide in Larrabetzu in February this year, dumping 100,000m3 of earth, causing traffic havoc due to the blocked road and trapping three people.

“Climate change is actually already happening in Paris,” said Marie Gantois, Project leader for adaptation to climate change, Climate and Energies Department of the City of Paris. The city suffered intensely under the heatwave nicknamed “Lucifer” in 2017, as well as a drought in 2017, thunderstorms in 2018 and flooding of the river Seine in spring 2018: “That was really unanticipated.”

Following the plenary discussion, participants explored the RESIN tools and methodologies in parallel sessions. For supporting the cycle of climate change adaptation decision-making, Gantois and RESIN research partner TNO led the exchange of city experiences and introduced the RESIN e-Guide’s potential to help make an adaptation plan. Mikel González Vara, City of Bilbao, along with representatives from Fraunhofer and the University of Manchester looked into diagnosing risk with the IVAVIA vulnerability assessment methodology and the online map-based European Climate Risk Typology. As the city of Zadar noted, the Climate Risk Typology could help identify other cities with similar climate risks. A new guidance document for IVAVIA has just been published and is available on the RESIN website, which includes advice on using IVAVIA in different ways, depending on resources available – an important lesson arising from working with the RESIN cities and their different needs and capacities.

The city of Bratislava and Tecnalia presented the Adaptation Options Library as a means to help prioritise adaptation measures and design incremental pathways for adaptation action. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority and Arcadis shared their work on creating ‘bankable’ opportunities to accelerate city resilience, based on recognising the value of adaptation measures and encouraging investment from those who can expect to later profit from publicly-funded developments. As Eric Schellekens, Arcadis said, “There is a lot more profit that you could capture and that you can have invested at the start of your project.”

New cities discovered the RESIN project in Bilbao and were impressed with the research, tools and methodologies developed. Raffaella Gueze, City of Bologna was one municipal representative discovering the project for the first time. “I found the RESIN tools very interesting and I want to try to apply the tools in my city with the implementation of our adaptation plan,” said Ms. Gueze.

The municipal representatives present agreed that climate adaptation progress depends on cooperation and communication: with citizens, with researchers, with the private sector, but most importantly, with each other. As RESIN project coordinator Peter Bosch suggested in his closing words, “Take that time to drink a cup of coffee with people from various departments before rushing in to develop your strategy… It takes years to get the full administrative setting around you... for moving towards adaptation: but it pays off.”

A photo gallery of the event is available at https://www.flickr.com/photos/iclei_europe/albums/72157696058386602.

Which sectors has your project focused on and why is resilience so important for these sectors? In our case, we have focused on cities. Our assumption was that if we would like Europe to be resilient, we needed a backbone of resilient cities. So, that’s the metaphor we have used. We would like to contribute to creating this backbone of European cities.

How can your European resilience management guidelines support resilience building in Europe? Our guideline and the five tools included in this guideline, contribute to the city resilience development process. In this process, there are many stakeholders involved, and we have defined a Maturity Model that goes through five stages. Each of the tools supports one cycle of these five stages. We have the Risk Systemicity Questionnaire, the Maturity Model, the Policies Tool, the City Resilience Dynamics tool, the Communication tool, and each of them are used in a cycle within this process going through the five maturity stages: Starting, Moderate, Advanced, Robust and Vertebrate.

Who can use the tools you have developed? Any stakeholder involved in this city resilience development process, starting from the local governments, and also including first responders, critical infrastructure operators, media, citizens: so any stakeholder involved in the city resilience development process.

What is different about your project compare to the other four DRS-7 projects? Our main contribution is including this perspective from the cities. Other projects have been more focused on critical infrastructure, which are of course very relevant to city resilience, but in our case, our unit of analysis – our focus – has been the city, which includes the critical infrastructure, but not the opposite. In some other cases, they have started from the critical infrastructure and then have gone to the local government.

What has been the most impactful outcome of your project? Listening to our users today, I would say that we have cooperated to break the silos among the departments in the cities. It is usual that cities have different departments: one related to climate change, another one related to mobility, another one related to social affairs. So during this project, we have created some cooperation opportunities among these departments, and I think that has been our main impact on them.

How did you contribute to the White Paper on Critical Infrastructure? Our contribution has been directed towards the inclusion of the city perspective. In addition to the perspective starting from critical infrastructure, we have added this perspective starting from cities, which I think is also very relevant.

Looking to the future, what are your thoughts on integrating the outcomes of the five projects? At this stage, we have many bricks that could be useful to build this resilient wall. Now, we know more about each other, we know more about the tools developed in other projects, so we have all the ingredients we need to create a good recipe. So, now we have to better understand how we can adapt the other projects’ developed tools into our guidelines. So, I am optimistic about the integration prospect.

Watch the video interview at https://youtu.be/laKVQJaJkVo.

A new European-funded project “Productive Green Infrastructure for Post-industrial Urban Regeneration (proGIreg)” was launched in Aachen on 12th June 2018. The cities of Dortmund (Germany), Turin (Italy) and Zagreb (Croatia) will harness the productive potential of key post-industrial areas with the involvement of local NGOs, community groups and residents.

The city of Dortmund will use the renatured Deusenberg landfill site to produce solar power and provide sports areas and creating fruit-producing forests with the local residents of Huckarde. Ultimately, the aim is to turn the isolated Huckarde borough into a green space, thereby filling in the missing link between two river sites that have already been converted into nature parks. “We would like to use the existing strengths of this urban area,” said Stefan Thabe, Department of City Planning and Building Regulations, City of Dortmund. “We would like to connect the existing potential, and we would like to improve quality of life in the urban area.”

A further central goal of the Living Lab Dortmund is to establish a community planned, built and operated aquaponic farm. Aquaponics is a combination of fish farming and soilless plant cultivation, where fish, plants and bacteria live together in a circular system, making farming possible in areas with hostile post-industrial soil. ProGIreg aims to design a lower tech, low cost aquaponics system that is accessible and suitable for community investment, community building and community operation. The technology has been implemented in Dortmund since 2012 and the project plans to use the experience of the city and its local expert partners to stimulate aquaponic innovations in the project's other cities. 

“We are planning to reconstruct a former meat processing plant to create a new centre in the Sesvete area,” said Matija Vuger, Head of Section for International and Regional Projects, City of Zagreb. “The nature-based interventions will include urban gardens, a new cycle path, a modern business innovation hub with green walls and green roofs, and aquaponics agriculture.”  

Turin will introduce nature-based solutions including aquaponics, cycle lanes, bee-friendly areas and green roofs and walls to the post-industrial ‘Mirafiori Sud’ area and to connect local groups already working on urban agriculture. Turin will experiment with the use of ‘new soil,’ produced by combining compost and special fungi with poor-quality, but uncontaminated soil, and will introduce carbon compensation and offset schemes for private companies and large public events. Elena Deambrogio, Head of Office for Smart Cities and EU Funds at Comune di Torino said, “This project is ambitious because we have to work on different sectoral policies, including urban regeneration, social and active inclusion, environment and green planning and economic development and support to innovation.”  

The three cities will work with four further cities in Eastern and Southern Europe: Cascais (Portugal), Cluj-Napoca (Romania), Piraeus (Greece) and Zenica (Bosnia and Herzegovina) to research, share and scale up the nature-based solutions tested along with 25 other organisations including coordinator Rheinsch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen (RWTH) and ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability. “We need to make politicians and decision-makers aware that nature-based solutions can be more than just for leisure activities, and that they are of crucial importance,” said Teresa Ribeiro, landscape architect at Cascais Ambiente.

“ProGIreg is the next step in bringing issues around green infrastructure, urban development and business innovation together,” said project coordinator Dr. Axel Timpe. “We are lucky to have an inspiring group of ambitious, committed and experienced cities on the proGIreg team, and together we will show the productive potential of green infrastructure for urban regeneration.”  

A large launch event will be held in Dortmund on 25-26 September. For more information, follow the project at www.twitter.com/progireg.

The Smart Mature Resilience cities of Athens, Greater Manchester and Reykjavik will represent the project at the major global urban sustainability conference, the ICLEI World Congress, in Montreal in June 2018.

At the ICLEI World Congress 2018 in June 2018, ICLEI - Local Governments for Sustainability and Ville de Montréal will bring together hundreds of mayors, governors, city staff, international organizations, business leaders and researchers to share their ideas, successes and challenges in advancing sustainable urban development worldwide. The Tier 3 cities, having joined the project in November 2017, are by now well-versed not only in the major standout resilience issues of today but have also gained a deep understanding of the research the project has carried out since 2015 into urban resilience building and development.

Held every three years, the ICLEI World Congress is among the top platforms for peer-to-peer exchange on the latest ideas and innovations designed to advance sustainable development in our urban world. Together, participants will examine key issues and solutions - from the circular economy to nature-based solutions and systemic resilience - set to play a key role in the development of our cities and regions.

More information and a programme are available at https://worldcongress2018.iclei.org/.

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.

Since hundreds of cities from over 40 countries first endorsed the Basque Declaration two years ago at the 8th European Conference on Sustainable Cities and Towns in Bilbao (Spain), commitment to the Declaration has been gaining momentum.

New signatories are joining the movement and cities are taking action to transform their communities for a more sustainable future. The Basque Declaration highlights the need to adapt to climate change, improve public space, protect water resources and air quality and enhance ecosystem services, and the Declaration provides pathways towards this transformation.

ICLEI Europe and the City of Bilbao are working together to return to the venue of this seminal conference, Bilbao’s Euskalduna Palace, for an implementation event on 5 July 2018, this time marking the implementation phase of the Basque Declaration.

City practitioners will come together with researchers to discuss and learn about practical approaches to building climate resilience for “Putting the Basque Declaration into Practice: Supporting climate change adaptation”, a stakeholder dialogue event on the topic of climate change adaptation and resilience.

The cities of Paris (France) and Bilbao will exchange with their peers from Zadar (Croatia), Padova and Alba (Italy), Almada (Portugal), Athens (Greece), London (UK), Strasbourg (France) and Warsaw (Poland), and further ambitious cities are invited to join the conversation.

As well as exchanging on the climate change adaptation measures underway in European cities, support tools and methods will be introduced, which can help local governments identify risks, assess their interdependencies and impacts, and select effective climate change adaptation solutions - now and in the future.

The tools and methods use standardised approaches, which help local governments collaborate with their peers in cities around Europe on climate challenges that transcend borders.

The tools and research to be presented at the event have been produced as part of the European-funded project RESIN – Resilient Cities and Infrastructures. Attendance is free of charge and registration is open until 22 June 2018.

For more information, click here.