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Cork City Council REACHOUT: Bridging the last mile on local climate action

Cork City Council REACHOUT: Bridging the last mile on local climate action

Date: 10 Dec 2021

Cork City Council’s is participating in a European project called REACHOUT.

The project will address improving local resilience by enabling its 7 participating ‘City Hubs’ – Cork is joined by Milan, Athens, Amsterdam, Gydnia (Poland), Lillestrom (Norway) and Logroño (Spain) – to work directly with climate experts from across Europe and international networks.
 
Using a co-creation process (where Cork City Council will be directly assisted by UCC’s MaREI Research Centre for Energy, Climate & Marine) the cities will be able to assess and tap into the availability of a range of resilience information support tools and services at European level. Topics such as stress testing, hazard mapping, progress tracking and pathway visualisation will be examined to see whether and how their application can be tailored in response to specific local needs. This is based on a three-step ‘Triple-A’ approach – derived from a recent Dutch government climate-proofing strategy – of matching analysis of vulnerabilities by the research, community with ambition as determined by the cities’ contexts and priorities in order to generate action at the local level, on the ground and in the air. For Cork, it is hoped to be able to identify areas of common interest among some of the other cities and even to co-trial certain tools for comparison purposes.
 
Accordingly, knowledge emerging from the initiative is expected to partly inform the development of our own Climate Action Plan in 2022 in areas such as the management of flooding and other severe weather events. Locally, the project will be led by the Climate Action Unit within the Strategic & Economic Development Directorate, but will itself have a reach right across the organisation, working through the Climate Action Team and informing the Climate Action Committee as to progress and findings.
 
REACHOUT was awarded €5 million in support by the EU Horizon 2020 programme for research and innovation and is Cork City Council’s first foray into funding tied into the vast EU Green Deal growth strategy to bring about a climate-neutral Europe by 2050 in a socially inclusive manner. It was one of only 5 proposals selected from 89 bids submitted to the call for ‘Developing end-user products and services for all stakeholders and citizens supporting climate adaptation and mitigation’ back in January.

Further information can be found at: https://www.deltares.nl/en/news/79934/