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/.

The Smart Mature Resilience team is on the road this February visiting European and global cities to train cities on the use of the tool suite that supports the European Resilience Management Guideline. Targeted regional workshops across Europe and a training session at the UN Habitat World Urban Forum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia will share the tools with a new pool of cities. The series kicked off on 8th February with a Southern Europe Regional Workshop in the Tier 3 city of Malaga (Spain). This workshop was aimed at cities from Andalusia and southern Spain, who will join the Tier 4 group of cities and focussed on the uptake of SMR tools for tackling relevant hazards for Spain and Southern Europe.

A training session on "Strategic planning tools for urban resilience: city-to-city exchange on local resilience planning" will include introductions to the European Resilience Management Guideline, training on the Resilience Maturity Model, Risk Systemicity Questionnaire and Resilience Building Policies tool, and will include contributions by the Tier 3 city of Malmö (Sweden), further European cities of Bonn (Germany) and Umea (Sweden). Participants will include local and national government representatives from China, Denmark, Angola, Morocco, Nepal, Ethiopia, USA, Australia, Kenya, Argentina and Yemen.

The regional workshop for Scandinavian cities will be held in Kristiansand on 13th February and will focus on the uptake of SMR tools for tackling relevant hazards for Scandinavia and Northern Europe, water management, extreme flooding events and failure of critical infrastructure. Confirmed cities to date include Kristiansand (Norway), Vejle (Denmark), Oslo (Norway), Stavanger (Norway) and Malmö (Sweden).

A Central Europe Regional Workshop will take place in Berlin on 15th February and will focus on the uptake of SMR tools for tackling relevant hazards for Central Europe, namely extreme weather events, failure of infrastructure, storms and flooding, getting collective feedback on the European Resilience Management Guideline and reinforcing city-to-city collaboration through co-creation activities on resilience. The workshop will be combined with a Standardization workshop organised by German standardization institute DIN on CEN Workshop 92 City Resilience Development: Operational Guidance.

The final regional workshop will take place on 28 February in Athens (Greece) for the southeastern European region. This event will focus on the uptake of SMR tools for tackling heat waves and the Urban Heat Island effect in Greek cities and for the implementation of the Resilient Athens 2030 strategy, reinforcing city-to-city collaboration through co-creation activities on resilience and getting collective feedback on the European Resilience Management. The event is aimed at adjacent and neighboring municipalities to Athens and further Greek cities, with a view to potentially joining the SMR Tier 4.

Following this series will be a high-level event aimed at policymakers in Brussels as part of ICLEI Europe's Breakfast at Sustainability's.

Click here for further details on the SMR events and registration.

The EPICURO – European Partnership for Innovative Cities within an Urban Resilient Outlook project has launched its first newsletter. EPICURO brings together a total of 10 EU partner (5 cities and 5 technical organizations) and aims to promote the sharing of good practices in urban resilience and climate change adaptation implemented at international, European and local level.

EPICURO is a twin project of RESIN and Smart Mature Resilience.

In this edition:

- EPICURO at a glance

- Come and meet us!

- Our first 10 months: achieved results

- Twinning projects

Download the newsletter here.

In 2018, the International Conference on Critical Information Infrastructures Security faces its 13th anniversary.

CRITIS 2018 continues the tradition of presenting innovative research and exploring new challenges in the field of critical (information) infrastructures protection (C(I)IP), resilience and fostering the dialogue with stakeholders.

CRITIS 2018 aims at bringing together researchers, professionals from academia, critical (information) infrastructure operators,

industry, defence sector and governmental organisations working in the field of the security of critical (information) infrastructure systems.

As in previous years, invited speakers will complement a programme of original research contributions. The conference invites the different research communities and disciplines involved in the C(I)IP space, and encourages discussions and multi-disciplinary approaches to relevant C(I)IP problems.

The Projects' Dissemination Session will be an opportunity of dissemination for ongoing European, multinational, and national projects.

Besides, this CRITIS conference has a special focus on current and uture energy infrastructures within a special session Energy infrastructure operators and stakeholders: key challenges and solution directions,Invited key experts from the energy sector will share their experience in the field.

›› Deadline for full - text submission is 30 April 2018.

The RESIN project consortium met in Brussels on 23-24 November 2017 to consider the project outputs in an international policy context and to invite guidance from the projects Advisory Board and reviewers.

The RESIN project’s ideal partnership of pioneering research experts and active city representatives uniquely position the project as creators of a complete adaptation action package. The RESIN tools, which are now nearing completion, will be the first of their kind, going beyond local cases and consolidating accumulated experience and knowledge to generate reliable, evidence-supported toolkits that will be both scientifically novel and user-friendly.

“We are approaching a crucial time in terms of solution finding.”

Diogo de Gusmao-Soerensen (DG Research, Head of Climate Services) stressed the importance of impact and policy relevance of research projects. As a European-funded project, RESIN is optimally placed to advise and guide policy developments on a local and international level on the topic of climate change adaptation in cities. Developments at the recent 2017 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP23) held in Bonn (Germany) showed that the issues addressed in this project are crucial. This topic of research and discussion is incredibly important and pertinent. European Union member states have made vital commitments to climate change at COP23 and must lead and bolster their peers in the international community to commit to climate change action.

“To some communities around the world, climate change of 1.5 degrees is high end climate change.”

An appeal was made to the project consortium to ensure that the high-end scenarios are taken on board when dealing with resilience. It is also important to take into account the economic aspects of adaptation and to focus on finding and offering solution to climate change adaptation challenges.

“We wanted to adjust the timing of the tool development to match cities’ needs.”

The RESIN partner cities have been central players in the RESIN project. While the original concept of the project was that the four core cities of Greater Manchester, Bratislava, Bilbao and Paris would test the tools developed by the research institutions, this relationship has developed to involve the cities in an even more central role. The project has aimed for optimal compatibility between tool development and strategic development in the cities by adjusting the timing of the tool development with the city’s local milestones. Further than the cities’ knowledge being applied to improve the tools’ quality, the RESIN cities have been able to already make progress on adaptation through the tools before the tools have even been developed to completion. Workshops focusing on knowledge transfer workshops showed the success of the co-creation process, as they demonstrated that the tools were also applicable to external (Tier 2) cities.

“Having something red green and amber for risk registries can be useful for cities.”

In terms of linking vulnerability and risk assessment, the Impact and Vulnerability Analysis (IVAVIA) tool has been a useful step as part of the co-creation process. Adaptation has been placed high on the agenda in the RESIN partner cities. The RESIN cities of Manchester and Bilbao have been central in the development of this tool and have both developed impact chains as part of the process.

Greater Manchester carried out a process of consultation to establish which impact chains to develop. Two were selected: road transport and green infrastructure. Supported by their RESIN co-creation partner, the Fraunhofer Institute, they held initial stakeholder workshops to establish the impact chains. This work aims to support decision-makers in Greater Manchester to push forward the adaptation and resilience agenda. Up to now, Greater Manchester has completed a case study, baseline assessment, priority impact chains and a two-stage risk assessment. Flood risk and transport infrastructure are a particular focus.

“We have to connect to our environment. We are four cities, but surrounding us there are further cities with related problems.”

Bilbao is looking ahead to the city’s new Adaptation Plan, which will be submitted next year. As part of their work on the development of IVAVIA, Bilbao developed an impact chain for flooding in built-up areas. This is a very real and immediate risk for the rainy coastal city. An impact chain was also developed about the impact of extreme precipitation on city traffic infrastructure. The process in Bilbao has shown the importance of cross-cutting data administration and the need for co-creation, not only within the RESIN project but to improve projects across the municipality.

Bratislava has been working with Tecnalia to develop a database of adaptation options. In the case of Bratislava, this co-creation process has been very closely linked to strategic processes in the city. Bratislava published a new “Action plan for adaptation to negative effects of climate change” in 2017. The city is planning to use the RESIN adaptation options library to evaluate the action plan for climate change adaptation progress every two years.

Bratislava found the adaptation options library to be useful for a number of purposes:

1) Adaptation planning for relevant departments, together with the outcomes of the vulnerability assessment

2) Preparing new concept and strategies for design of public space

3) For meeting standards and limits set by competition rules

The tools of the RESIN project are useful as a complementary combined suite of tools, which provide cities with comprehensive decision support taking them though the whole climate change adaptation planning process. This suite is hosted in an online guidance platform called the “eGuide”. A prototype eGuide is already available online at e-guide.resin.itti.com.pl. An update is planned for Spring 2018 and the final version will be released in Autumn 2018.

The eGuide has been developed for and by the end users. It provides practical information, guidance, the suite of RESIN tools and a structure to document and save the reports and materials a city develops as part of the climate change adaptation planning process. This answers to the reality in cities where strategies can develop over several years, and in the case of staff circulation, new staff need an integrated platform to find information on processes that may span across several municipal departments and involve public-private actors.

The final RESIN tools will be launched in Spring 2018. RESIN will hold its first public event aimed at city practitioners in Greater Manchester on 1st February: Solutions for strategic adaptation planning in European cities.

The Smart Mature Resilience (SMR) website, developed and managed by the ICLEI European Secretariat in Freiburg (Germany), was awarded the .eu Web Award 2017 in "The Laurels" category at a prestigious ceremony in Brussels (Belgium) on 21 November. The award ceremony was organised by EURid, the registration system for the .eu domain name on behalf of the European Commission.

In “The Laurels” category, the best websites for education, institutions and European projects compete for the award. Thanks to consistently high communication competence and content quality, ICLEI was able to win the award for a second year in a row. In 2016, ICLEI won the award in the “Better World” category for the www.mobilityweek.eu website. The winning website receives a video about the project and the website.

Speaking about the award, Ruud Schuthof, ICLEI Europe Deputy Regional Director for communications, said: "The .eu web award is a great honour for ICLEI and is a recognition of ICLEI's quality and longstanding experience in the field of communication on the topic of sustainability in cities. To have won the award for the second time confirms our work's merit."

Jose Maria Sarriegi, coordinator of the SMR project, added: “It is an honor to be recognised as the best webpage in the Laurels category of the Eurid web awards. We hope this award will increase the number of cities using the tools available in our website, which is our main objective.”

For more information about the SMR project, visit the project website.

Representatives of 19 cities and municipalities met in Thessaloniki on 7th November for the Smart Mature Resilience project's Stakeholder Dialogue event. 9 cities became the newest members of the SMR project, joining the project’s 7 cities, which have been working with researchers for the last 2 years to develop tools to support cities in strategically developing their resilience. The cities to join the Tier 3 group were identified on the basis of experience and knowledge of resilience development. The event marked the launch of the project's third circle of cities aiming to build a backbone of resilient cities in Europe.

Four of the cities have developed this knowledge through membership of ICLEI: the Greater Amman Municipality (Jordan), Malmö (Sweden), Münster (Germany) and Rekjavik (Iceland), or participation in projects like the RESIN project (www.resin-cities.eu) in partnership with ICLEI, in the case of Greater Manchester (United Kingdom), or are part of other projects and international networks: Athens (Greece), Malaga (Spain), Stirling (United Kingdom) and Thessaloniki (Greece).

As a true dialogue, the new cities were active contributors to the event as well as receiving training from the project's Tier 1 and Tier 2 cities and research partners. Aphrodite Bouikidis, Resilient Thessaloniki, presented Thessaloniki's Resilience Strategy, presenting the city's general resilience goals: Shape a Thriving and Sustainable City, Co-create an Inclusive City, Build a Dynamic Urban Economy and Responsive City and Re-discover the City's Relationship with the Sea.

Giorgos Dimarelos, Deputy Mayor for Urban Resilience and Development Planning, shared Thessaloniki’s journey towards resilience amid intense challenges, including the financial crisis, the challenge of integrating refugees, and adverse weather effects from climate change. Steps by the city council have produced positive results in creating cooperative relationships with stakeholders, establishing a promising basis for achieving the city's goals, such as tackling unemployment and re-establishing a meaningful connection between the city and its coastline. The Deputy Mayor demonstrated how the city had successfully won support from the regional government to develop the coastline area in collaboration with neighbouring municipalities.

The cities of Kristiansand, Greater Manchester and San Sebastian are, like Thessaloniki, coastal cities, and each city shared their experience with working with critical infrastructure providers, first responders and citizens to deal with crisis situations caused by flooding, and to develop preparedness and resilience to flooding as part of the cities' daily work. Kristiansand and San Sebastian are applying the tools of the SMR project to conduct self-assessment and audit of the city's policies and current levels of investment in resilience, as well as considering the interdependencies of risk using the Risk Systemicity Questionnaire (RSQ). These cities are now serving as guides and peer trainers to their Tier 3 partner cities to pass on the knowledge they have developed through the SMR project.

The city of Amman, Jordan, shares challenges with some European cities. The population in the city has more than doubled in the last decade due to the war in neighbouring Syria, and the municipality has been working overtime to provide support to the new inhabitants and stretch the city’s infrastructure and housing to accommodate the unprecedented population pressures. Its ICLEI member peer, Malmö, has also introduced programmes in response to refugees seeking asylum from war, and the cities could compare challenges, risks and policies that have been implemented in both cities.

The event proceeded with training on the SMR City Dynamics Model. Cities were divided into groups and played the project's serious game to play in a simulation sandbox and experiment with the effects of different budget options. As budget experiments cannot be carried out in real life in cities, simulations provide a way for practitioners and decision-makers to try out different investment options in a safe environment. The game helps users to better understand the Resilience Maturity Model and to see through trial and error playing, the significant benefit of implementing policies in the order laid out in the Resilience Maturity Model.

The cities participated in a training session on the SMR Risk Systemicity Questionnaire (RSQ). The participants were divided into 5 groups, with a mix of city representatives in each group. Each group was facilitated by a Tier 1 or 2 city representative who had been involved in the development of the RSQ, with support from Strathclyde or an experienced user of the RSQ. Each group addressed different topics in the RSQ: Public Unrest; Elderly; Social Cohesion; Critical Infrastructure; Climate Change – air pollution.

There was a high level of debate and involvement about risk scenarios and potential strategies that could be implemented to prepare for interconnected risks. The groups were able to experience focused discussion on risk scenarios in cities facilitated by use of the RSQ. The Tier 3 cities were able to quickly understand how the tool worked and were able to use in in a trial run in practice. Some Tier 3 cities were already confident in their plans to run RSQ-based workshops locally.

Clara Grimes (ICLEI Europe) trained the cities on approaches for communicating best practices for resilience in cities based on narrative methods. Effectively communicating projects and policies in story form is essential so that citizens, stakeholders, other departments of the municipality and the media can better understand and connect with a city’s aims and progress. The cities of Stirling (UK), Malmö (Sweden), Glasgow (UK), Vejle (Denmark) and Rome (Italy) then applied these methods to tell the story of their local best practices to the cities and stakeholders present at the event, including community group activities in Stirling, crisis management in Malmö, resilience education in schools in Glasgow and a programme where a design school ‘designed’ ways for severely disabled people to make meaningful friendships beyond their professional relationships with their carers. Further resilience stories are available for reference in the SMR Policies Tool. Finally, researchers from the Center for Integrated Emergency Management presented on the SMR Resilience Information Portal and how cities can pick and choose code from this portal toolbox to supplement their resilience management information infrastructure.

The Tier 3 programme will continue with online training webinars and an in-person Stakeholder Workshop as part of the Breakfast at Sustainability's event series in Brussels on 7th March.

“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.

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.

The Smart Mature Resilience project is undergoing an intensive training period, where local stakeholders in the core cities of Donostia/San Sebastian, Glasgow and Kristiansand are receiving in-depth training on how to use the latest tools developed by the project; the Resilience Building Policies Tool and the City Dynamics Model. Two stakeholder training workshops took place in Glasgow and in Kristiansand. Local stakeholders received training on how to use the City Dynamics Model (previously referred to as the System Dynamics Model), which supports the already available Resilience Maturity Model.

The City Dynamics Model helps users, specifically municipal employees and elected officials involved in strategic planning and city management, better understand the main elements of the resilience building process in their city. It helps them prioritize the most urgent policies they should implement in order for their city to build resilience and guides them in planning relevant activities at a local level. During the training session in Glasgow, the participants worked on a flood scenario, to identify the best policies to improve preparedness and critical infrastructure performance and to better anticipate future water management challenges. In Kristiansand, the case study focused on some of the aspects of the recently developed and adapted Kristiansand Action Plan, and more specifically on the policies that would advance urban, green growth in the Nordic port city.

Following the trainings, webinars will be held, where the Tier 2 cities of Rome, Riga and Vejle will be briefed on the training activities and results from the implementing cities, the tool developers of TECNUN, University of Navarra, CIEM Center for Integrated Emergency Management, University of Agder and co-creation partner ICLEI Europe, and will ask questions and provide feedback on the results. The SMR partner cities are also preparing to take over a mentoring role for the upcoming final pilot implementation of the project, where a new Tier 3 group of cities will join them in resilience building activities. The City Dynamics Model will be available on the SMR website at the beginning of November 2017.