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RESCCUE - RESilience to cope with Climate Change in Urban arEas - a multisectorial approach focusing on water

Periodic Reporting for period 3 - RESCCUE (RESCCUE - RESilience to cope with Climate Change in Urban arEas - a multisectorial approach focusing on water)

Période du rapport: 2019-05-01 au 2020-11-30

RESCCUE aimed to deliver a framework enabling city resilience assessment, planning and management by integrating into several web-based tools new knowledge related to the detailed modelling of strategic urban services performance. These tools assess urban resilience from a multisectorial approach, for current and future climate change scenarios and including multiple hazards.

After four and a half years of hard work and thanks to the involvement of a multidisciplinary team of experts, the RESCCUE project has produced a huge amount of results. A lot of work has been done to help cities increase their resilience to climate change.

The RESCCUE methodology was tested in 3 EU cities (Barcelona, Bristol and Lisbon). Based on the existing climate plans of the cities and workshops with stakeholders, the project proposed 4 strategies and 27 measures for Barcelona, 3 strategies and 14 measures for Bristol and 6 strategies and 24 measures for Lisbon.

What RESCCUE has produced is only the beginning. RESCCUE will have a significant impact on the urban resilience sector in Europe because the methodologies and tools developed to enable city resilience assessment, planning and management, can be easily used elsewhere so other cities can replicate the RESCCUE results. All RESCCUE’s results, the main tools, models, data sets and methodologies are showcased in an end user, city manager and urban service operator-oriented toolkit. These solutions are ready to be deployed to different cities with different climate change pressures.

As most of the world population will end up living in cities, it is critical and highly urgent to have tools available to assess, plan, and monitor urban resilience in an integral way. This urgency, justified by the already proven climate change effects, will favor the rapid deployment of RESCCUE’s tools.
RESCCUE's methodology begins with the analysis of climate change variables, as they are the main driver putting pressure in the analysed cities. Related to climate change analysis, future predictions suitable for users’ needs for the three research sites (including scenarios with extreme events) are generated.

The detailed analysis of sectorial models is also critical. The hazard maps increase the understanding of how urban services affect others. The models identified are set up, calibrated and validated. Then, the hazards for the current situation and future scenarios (including adaptation strategies being considered) are modelled.

Once the hazards are identified, impacts can be modelled. Several methodologies and tools to assess impacts are identified and updated. These methodologies are used to quantify the impacts corresponging to the several hazards, for the current and future scenarios (including adaptation strategies being considered).

Moving from the sectorial view to a holistic one is one of the key goals of the RESCCUE project. Therefore, a holistic resilience assessment with the tool HAZUR has been done in the three research sites. Feedback from the implementators of HAZUR tool was collected, so new functionalities and the modules for Climate Change and Strategies could be developed. This new version of the tool was used to carry out a re-assessment in each city.

Once the problems are identified and analysed, RESCCUE also aims to find the best solutions to cope with these impacts. In order to do this, several measures that could be implemented to increase resilience in the cities have been analysed and gathered in a database for possible use by the cities. Then, a tool allows to combine and particularize the measures in order to build strategies that finally, can be prioritised. Two different approaches to prioritise strategies have been defined depending on the level of information available. These are used in the hazard, impact and holistic assessements so the effectiveness of the strategies can be assessed. An updated version of this tool was finally created, easing the process of strategies selection by the end-users.

As RESCCUE is not the only urban resilience initiative that exists, it is important to validate the work done with what is being done elsewhere. Therefore, the previous work carried out in the three cities has been reviewed. A Resilience Assessment Framework (RAF) has been created, together with the RAF APP that eases its use. This was used to elaborate the Resilience Action Plans for each city. An e-book with the best practices and lessons learnt from the project was also produced.
In order to reach RESCCUE's target audience, all the communication materials and strategies to disseminate RESCCUE have been prepared, together with RESCCUE's website and the Exploitation and Business Plans. The local workshops in the three cities were organized, together with the URCC conference, and online event that gathered more than 400 urban resilience professionals (https://www.urcc2020.eu/). The RESCCUE Toolkit was also produced to showcase all the project results (https://toolkit.resccue.eu/)
RESCCUE will have a significant impact on the urban resilience sector in Europe, because it has delivered tools to enable city resilience assessment, planning and management and it has incorporated new knowledge of their urban systems performance under climate change conditions that currently is not integrated in this type of tools:

*Rapid large-scale deployment and market uptake of climate change adaptation solutions.
*Contribution to the development of technological and performance standards for adaptation options.
*Improving innovation capacity and the integration of new knowledge
*Strengthening the competitiveness and growth of companies by developing innovations meeting the needs of European and global markets; and, where relevant, by delivering such innovations to the markets
*Environmental and social impacts
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