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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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/.

The fifth edition of Open European Day has proven to be the most popular edition yet. Cities are acutely aware of the challenges they are facing and are coming together to discuss these challenges and share solutions with their peers and experts from the world of science and research.

Speakers to join the opening discussion reflecting on the past year and years to come for climate adaptation in Europe will include Nicolas Faivre, DG Research, European Commission, Stefanie Lindenberg, NCFF European Investment Bank, Bernd Decker, EASME/LIFE Programme, Stefania Manca and Paolo Castiglieri, Municipality of Genoa (Italy) for the Climate Adaptation Partnership of the EU Urban Agenda, Eleni Myrivili, City of Athens (Greece), Joanna Kiernicka-Allavena, City of Wroclaw (Poland)/44MPA project and Marian Barquin, Basque Government.

Breakout sessions will see cities discuss topics including flooding, insurance, nature-based solutions, cultural heritage and partnerships and will include contributors from the cities of Arnsberg (Germany), Bologna (Italy), Budapest (Hungary), Cascais (Portugal), Copenhagen (Denmark), Glasgow, Greater Manchester (United Kingdom), Guimaraes (Portugal), Helsinki (Finland), Kristiansand (Norway), Paris (France) and Thessaloniki (Greece). The Open European Day’s successful Marketplace will be back this year as a unique space for exchange and partnerships.

As a new addition for the fifth Open European Day, breakout training sessions will provide expert training on topics including critical infrastructure protection, citizen engagement and financing adaptation.

Strathclyde Business School and Fraunhofer Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems (IAIS) will provide training on critical infrastructure protection, using the outcomes from the Smart Mature Resilience and RESIN projects, which are co-organising the event.

On:Subject and the European Environment Agency will provide training on citizen engagement for adaptation and EASME/LIFE Programme and the European Investment Bank will provide training for cities on how to access financing to fund urban adaptation. Registration is now closed.

More information and the final programme is available here. 

Representatives of over 30 cities and regions in Europe, the European Commission and scientific experts on resilience attended the 27th edition of ICLEI Europe’s Breakfast at Sustainability’s series. The event was hosted by the European office of the Basque Country and a welcome address was provided by – Ignacio de la Puerta, Director for Urban Planning of the Basque Government. A brief introduction to the Smart Mature Resilience project and its tools was provided by Vasileios Latinos, ICLEI Europe.

Mr de la Puerta emphasised in his words of welcome the need to provide space and quality of life for Basque residents. An integrated action plan, as well as participation in numerous local, regional and international projects and programmes, such as Donostia/San Sebastián’s participation in the Smart Mature Resilience Project are addressing this need. The path is a shared one and cities in Europe are welcome to join the Basque Country on this journey by considering the pathways towards transformative action laid out in the Basque Declaration.

Cities must work together in a coordinated way towards long-term resilience goals. For Ben Caspar, Team Leader for Urban Environment for the European Commission’s DG Environment, cities have enormous potential to overcome global challenges. The Pact of Amsterdam has made funding streams easier to understand and has led to enhanced support and cooperation between the European Commission and city networks. As well as funding the European Commission offers other resources to cities, including online tools, such as a new portal planned to be launched during Green Week. Ronny Frederickx, Former President and Good Governance Project Leader, UDITE considered resilience from the perspective of good governance, and warned that lack of trust in political leaders, lack of capacity and ‘segregation in craftsmanship’ or lack of cooperation as drivers of risk. He called for a good governance approach in order to overcome these challenges, as well as for a triangle between science, education and practice.

The innovative and inspiring “Room for the river Waal” project saw attitudes among citizens to the large-scale project turn from hostility and resistance, to sentiments among citizens of pride and ownership of the project. Ton Verhoeven, Arnhem Nijmegen City Region, Netherlands shared how this was achieved through intensive communication and engagement of stakeholders.

Glasgow and Rome are working together on their resilience journey: both cities are part of the Smart Mature Resilience project as well as ICLEI members and members of 100 Resilient Cities. Frankie Barrett, Glasgow City Council and Claudio Bordi, Risorse per Roma. Public authorities in Glasgow are as of recently obliged to involve communities as part of their work, and ongoing projects range across numerous topical areas, for example food security and land use. In Glasgow’s experience, "When citizens are not involved in the plan, it will fail." Rome has used a tool produced by the Smart Mature Resilience project, the Risk Systemicity Questionnaire, to hold cross-sectoral meetings with a goal to break silos and better understand risk.

Annette Figueiredo, Greater London Authority described a recently concluded audit of school air quality in London. Poor air quality has detrimental effects on children’s learning, and a survey revealed that over 360 schools were in poor air quality areas. The Mayor of London, as part of a vision to clean up London’s air received a petition from Greenpeace signed by 303 teachers calling for better air quality near schools, and fifty schools were selected.  The project involved the cooperation of the relevant boroughs, Transport for London, Public Health and other Greater London Authority programmes working with schools, researchers and academics. The collected data will be used in the schools’ curricula so that students can understand how it affects their lives.

For the second part of the day, Serene Hanania, ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability, invited cities to participate in an interactive workshop. Discussion groups considered topics such as heat waves, flood risks, social issues and emergency response and exchanged their experiences from their respective cities on the topics. The SMR project representatives then demonstrated how the tools co-produced in the project by cities and researchers could support the newcomer cities in overcoming the challenges they raised in the discussions.

In terms of flooding, cross-departmental silos were found to be a major challenge in British cities, as management of water courses was not closely linked to response mechanisms, and vulnerable groups were found to be more exposed to flood risk. Here, Nijmegen could explain their unique case, where better communication on water planning and management is possible due to Dutch water boards. The SMR City Resilience Dynamics tool was mentioned in a possible application to measure surface water interventions.

On the subject of heat waves, desertification and the benefits of reforestation were discussed for cities in Spain. In Italy, paradoxically, abandonment of agricultural areas and increase of rain has led to natural reforestation. The most vulnerable cities to heat waves were considered to be Athens and Rome. Here, the Risk Systemicity Questionnaire was recommended, as awareness of the risk of heat waves seriously underestimates the real mortality rate among elderly people during periods of extreme heat. Malmö, Sweden, expressed the benefits of exchanging with Southern cities with cultural experience of caring for the elderly during heat waves, as heat stress is becoming an increasing problem for Malmö. Here, better access to data on mortality rates would be helpful to gain political support for, elderly, patient and hospice care to take additional measures during heat waves.

A common feature of the cities was the importance of involving volunteers and NGOs in emergency response. While cities and municipalities must adhere to standards, guidelines and norms for emergency response, citizens can step in and provide non-professional support magnanimously, for example providing unofficial transport and meals to refugees. Dedicated policies for involving NGOs and volunteers are included in the Resilience Maturity Model.

IT solutions offer interesting innovative ways to prevent food waste and to build communities in new way. Representative democracy and transparent decision-making were considered to be crucial foundations for social resilience. Decreasing vulnerability is intricately connected to employment, and in the case of French regions, citizens can become alienated as a result of unemployment. 

The cities present shared many aspects and practices around emergency response. Most cities had emergency plans and the same way of responding to an emergency. Malmö provided another perspective, for example, that experts were called in the event of a crisis. In each of the cities, in many cases, those working in emergency response have other responsibilities under normal circumstances, where response takes preference over these duties during a crisis. Risk assessment was considered essential, and the SMR Risk Systemicity Questionnaire is available to be used as part of this process.

A photo gallery of the event is available at https://flic.kr/s/aHsmeXRgWi.

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.

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.

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.