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.

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.

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.

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 Italian municipalities of Bologna and Genoa called for local authorities attending Open European Day 2018 in Bonn (Germany) today to join them in contributing to the EU Urban Agenda

The municipality of Bologna (Italy), Genoa (Italy) and the European Investment Bank last week called for the local governments that met at the Open European Day event in Bonn to contribute to the European Urban Agenda by participating in the EU Partnerships on Adaptation and one on Land Use Planning  and Nature-Based Solutions.  

Giovanni Fini, City of Bologna, said: “The main aim of the partnership is to contribute to the forthcoming European policies on urban development. This is a truly challenging activity and it will only succeed if we can involve as many other European cities and local authorities as possible.”

“The Urban Agenda is an inclusive participatory instrument, that put on the same round table local authorities, Member States, Directorates General of the EU, EU programmes, networks and stakeholders, all together in a multilevel co-operative approach to discuss and co-work for the future policies through delivery of an Action Plan,” said Stefania Manca, Genoa Municipality and coordinator of the Climate Adaptation Partnership Urban Agenda. “The message is that all of us are equal. On the field of climate adaptation, our main focus is on Climate Resilience, vulnerability assessment and risk management. We are at the Open European Day to spread the work of the partnership, to help us involve more cities in the process of the public consultation of the Plan foreseen after June 2018.”

The Open European Day was first held in 2013 and is known among municipal climate practitioners as the place to meet other local governments and swap methods and opportunities for implementing climate change adaptation and urban resilience measures.

155 local government representatives, climate change adaptation experts and local and national government representatives have joined the climate adaptation conference in Bonn to meet other city representatives for peer-based discussions.

Reinhard Limbach, Deputy Mayor of the city of Bonn, hosts of the event, said: “To be prepared for future incidents, we must create suitable technical infrastructure and work on an innovative, nature-based strategy… I find it so important to come together and to make use of the elaborated European system, to benefit from the exchange with our direct neighbours.”

As the event, organized by ICLEI – Local Governments for Sustainability and the European Environment Agency, has grown over five editions, European institutions are seeing the value in joining the conversation with local governments.

“What regional organizations do, the country does, or even the European Union does, matters for cities,” said Birgit Georgi, Strong Cities in a Changing Climate. “They build a framework in which the cities connect, and so we started to invite more and more also these levels, like from the European Commission or national governments or regional governments and other supporters, because as cities cannot move alone forward to be more resilient, national governments, you cannot without these cities. We have to work together in a multi-level approach.”

The 5th edition was supported by the European Commission, the European Investment Bank and Ramboll and co-organised by the European-funded Smart Mature Resilience project, RESIN – Climate Resilient Cities and Infrastructures and PLACARD. The event is held annually.

For more information on the Partnership, please click here.

Photo gallery: https://flic.kr/s/aHsmh5cQct

New guidelines show the way to making Europe’s cities more resilient to natural and man-made disasters.

Europeans are no strangers to high-impact disasters. Ranging from natural events such as earthquakes and floods, to man-made crises in the form of cyberattacks and terrorist incidents, such disasters are becoming increasingly frequent and more severe. This jeopardises critical infrastructures (CIs) like power grids, transport networks and telecommunications systems – that are essential for a society and economy to function.

We need to ensure that our modern societies are better equipped to withstand and bounce back from both expected and unexpected crises. In response to this need, five EU-funded projects, DARWIN, IMPROVER, RESILENS, RESOLUTE and SMR, have developed guidelines for improving European cities’ resilience to natural and man-made disasters. Their efforts have culminated in a ‘White Paper on Resilience Management Guidelines for Critical Infrastructures’. The report provides key recommendations for policymakers to improve policy and implementation strategies throughout the EU.

The White Paper presenting the new guidelines was launched at the Critical Infrastructure Resilience 2018 Conference held in Brussels on 10 April. Resilience experts and end users across the five projects spoke on topics such as resilience intervention tools and benefits, resilience policy, standardisation and current needs, further needs and a roadmap to integration.

Techniques and tools for resilience

To support uptake of the resilience management guidelines, the projects developed a series of techniques and tools. These include conferences and industry presentations, webinars, workshops, and experiments providing hands-on experiences to engage end users.

To teach players about resilience concepts, DARWIN developed a serious game based on virtual reality. RESILENS activities included the creation of an e-learning hub and a resilience management matrix and audit toolkit. SMR developed a Resilience Maturity Model, a strategic tool that provides an ideal roadmap for how the resilience building process should be. Its Resilience Information and Communication Portal, another of its project outputs, serves as a toolbox that can complement and enhance the platforms and software that cities already have in place.

IMPROVER’s cooperation with the European Reference Network for CI Protection has yielded a series of CI operator workshops on CI resilience to ensure that practitioners both inform and benefit from the project’s work. RESOLUTE’s focus on urban transport resilience has resulted in a game-based training app aimed at improving citizen preparation. Another project outcome is an emergency mobile app to keep citizens updated and advise them on what action to take to stay safe in an emergency.

DARWIN (Expecting the unexpected and know how to respond), IMPROVER (Improved risk evaluation and implementation of resilience concepts to critical infrastructure), RESILENS (RESILENS: Realising European ReSiliencE for CritIcaL INfraStructure), RESOLUTE (RESilience management guidelines and Operationalization appLied to Urban Transport Environment), and SMR (Smart Mature Resilience) are now drawing to a close. The European resilience management guidelines resulting from their efforts will guide stakeholders towards helping Europe’s cities to respond to crises more quickly and effectively.