Author(s): Russo Beniamino; Andrea Paindelli; Angel Villanueva; Montse Martinez

Linked Author(s): Andrea Paindelli

Keywords: Urban resilience; Climate change; Adaptation; Disaster risk management; Impact assessment

Abstract: From May 2016 until November 2020 AQUATEC coordinated Europe’s first large-scale innovative project on urban resilience: the RESCCUE Project (RESilience to cope with Climate Change in Urban arEas–a multisectorial approach focusing on water). RESCCUE (www.resccue.eu) built around three research sites (Barcelona, Lisbon and Bristol) co-funded by the EU Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant Agreement no.700174, with a total budget of 8 M€. RESCCUE team was integrated by AQUATEC as project coordinator; 3 city councils of the cities included in the study; the United Nations agency for human settlements (UN-Habitat); utilities: Endesa, EDP, Aguas de Portugal, and Wessex Water; research centers: Cetaqua, FIC, LNEC and IREC; universities: University of Exeter and EIVP and SMEs: Hidra and UrbanDNA. Considering that most of world population will end up living in cities the main objective of the RESCCUE project was to help urban areas around the world to become more resilient to climate change. RESCCUE has provided innovative models and tools to improve the ability of cities to withstand and recover quickly from multiple shocks and stresses and maintain continuity of services. The three case studies, Barcelona, Bristol, and Lisbon, have become a testing platform for the cutting-edge technologies developed in RESCCUE, but these are also ready to be deployed to different types of cities, with different climate change pressures. To foster the replication of these results, the main tools, models, datasets and methodologies developed in RESCCUE are showcased in an end-users – city managers and urban service operators – oriented toolkit (https://toolkit.resccue.eu/). From climate change scenarios to dissemination tools, and from sectorial models to Resilience Action Plans (RAPs), the outputs that have been produced are very diverse, but special focus is put on the urban water cycle and urban floods. All the project results have a common goal: to increase the resilience of cities from around the world, by offering the methodologies and tools so anyone can take advantage of using them and replicate the RESCCUE results. Key results of RESCCUE include: •Climate Change Scenarios and Risk Assessment •Climate Change Adaptation Strategies Prioritization Methodology •Resilience Action Plans (RAP) for the three RESCCUE Cities What has been developed for Barcelona, Bristol and Lisbon, is now ready to be replicated to any other city, taking advantage of the team of experts from RESCCUE and the RESCCUE Toolkit. RESCCUE project provided a significant advance in the state of the art of climate related impacts assessment. Multi hazards and impacts models should be used to improve planning and operation of main urban services to face climate change effects. Synergies with on-going and future projects and experiences related to short and mid-terms EWS (including seasonal prediction) and long-term projections could help to cover this gap.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.3850/IAHR-39WC2521711920221667

Year: 2022