How are UIA projects contributing to building resilient cities, adapting to the climate emergency?
About
This report is the result of a policy-lab organised with UIA climate adaptation projects during 2022 UIA event in Seville. UIA Experts, Birgit Georgi, Constantinos Cartalis and Maria Sitzoglou collected inputs from the RESILIO (Amsterdam), GBG_AS2C (Barcelona), IGNITION (Greater Manchester), OASIS (Paris) and GUARDIAN (Riba - Roja) projects and analyse their key results on three hot topics for EU cities:
- Re-designing urban spaces for climate adaptation
- Keeping the city resilient under climate extremes
- Citizen’s engagement and participation – a vital requirement to create climate-resilient cities.
Introduction
The 6th report from Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (ICCP) started with this staggering observation: “Global net anthropogenic Greenhouse Gas (GHG) emissions during the last decade (2010-2019) were higher than at any previous time in human history”. It is widely acknowledged that urban areas are major contributors to climate change and indeed to GHG emissions, while being vulnerable to climate change.
Chapters
Re-designing urban spaces for climate adaptation
In our densely built cities, the scarcity of available spaces for new uses adds another level of complexity to implement solutions for climate adaptation. Although integrating such solutions within the urban fabric demands space, valuable opportunities arise when cities re-think the use and the design of their building stock and their open spaces.
Keeping the city resilient under climate extremes
Cities face climate extremes - defined as the occurrence of a value of a weather or climate variable above (or below) a threshold value – with devastating impacts on the safety and the lives of citizens, the city infrastructures, the private properties, the urban environment, and the local economy. At the same time, climate projections for the next decades indicate that climate extremes will be of higher frequency, duration, and strength.
Citizen’s engagement and participation – a vital requirement to create climate-resilient cities
How citizens live and behave and how public and private actions interact can enforce adaptation to climate change or – in some case – hamper it.
Case studies
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank the three UIA Experts, Birgit Georgi, Constantinos Cartalis and Maria Sitzoglou for their work on the report. A special thank you goes for the project managers and partners of the RESILIO, GBG_AS2C, IGNITION, OASIS, CARTUJA QANAT and GUARDIAN projects who contributed with their knowledge to the publication and their active participation to the policy-lab.
About this resource
By Birgit Georgi, Constantinos Cartalis, Maria Sitzoglou, UIA Experts
The Urban Innovative Actions (UIA) is a European Union initiative that provided funding to urban areas across Europe to test new and unproven solutions to urban challenges. The initiative had a total ERDF budget of €372 million for 2014-2020.
