A few days ago, one of the most significant known cyber-terrorist attacks to date hit some of the world's major technological and media groups. The fall-out saw citizens unable to access their online services and raised alarm as to whether user data could have landed in the hands of cybercriminals.

A team of researchers at Tecnun, University of Navarra, has been working for on the Smart Mature Resilience project for the last, as the coordinator of a consortium of 13 institutions, universities and experts in resilience.

The objective of this project is to deal with potential crises resulting from climate change, social dynamics, and possible failures or emergencies in critical infrastructure, creating guides European resilience to prevent and deal with the potential consequences of these phenomena.

SMR is currently developing a communication and engagement platform, which is designed to support cities and emergency services in their communication with citizens.

Cities and city administrations are complex systems with existing processes and channels for communicating internally and with their citizens. Rather than proposing to replace or substitute processes already in use and familiar to citizens, SMR will provide a toolkit for cities to be able to 'fill in the blanks' where their current communication channels are lacking facilities.

This will serve as a toolbox, where cities can compare the communication systems already in place in their systems and choose elements and features of the platform to serve their individual contexts. The tool works with real-time concrete data, which can be supplied by different users on different administrative levels, and the platform is designed for ease of use and does not require advanced technical knowledge.

A resilient city is not only made up of bricks and mortar, but of flexible systems of elements working together. This complexity has been creatively visualised online in an interactive map of short video clips. As part of RAMSES, a European-funded research project on climate impacts and adaptation strategies for cities, Climate Media Factory has condensed scientific research into a compilation of over 100 short interview sequences from 33 climate change adaptation and resilience experts.

Users can define their own way of navigating the “On Urban Resilience” platform by auto-playing videos, searching by keyword or branching off into a topic-specific strand of clips to learn more in greater detail. “On Urban Resilience” is designed to help cities to find information on climate change impacts and to explore their options for adapting to climate change and for building city resilience. Contributions by experts on adaptation and resilience from across Europe cover topics such as social adaptation, local climate change models, political commitments and how to start an adaptation strategy in cities.

Frans Berkhout of King’s College London, said: “Cities are competing more and more in terms of their climate resilience. These are risks that are real, they’re tangible, investors know about them, they care about them, and therefore cities need to wake up and start to transform their infrastructures in a climate resilient way.” “On Urban Resilience” is available online for free at http://on-urban-resilience.eu/.

For more information, visit the RAMSES website.

People and communities are the key component of a new strategy intended to build ICLEI Member City Glasgow’s (UK) resilience against the impact of the shocks and stresses faced by a city in the 21st century. The “Resilient Glasgow” Strategy details 50 different actions intended to create a stronger and more adaptable city.

Based on a detailed conversation with 3,500 Glasgow-residents, the strategy is the first of its kind to be released in the UK. It focuses on issues such as economic growth, tackling inequality, enhancing partnerships at all levels, delivering services around the needs of citizens, and building capacity for resilience among the city’s population.

Glasgow is a core city of the Smart Mature Resilience (SMR) project, which aims to support city decision-makers in developing and implementing resilience measures in their cities. As part of the project, Glasgow and its local research partner, the University of Strathclyde, are working closely together on co-creating and testing the project's tools, with a particular focus in Glasgow's case on building resilience against flood risk. Tier 2 cities of Rome (Italy) and Riga (Latvia) are observing Glasgow's progress and providing feedback, which will ensure that the final tools are widely replicable and applicable to all cities in Europe.

For more information, visit the Smart Mature Resilience website.