City Hubs
Climate action, and specifically adaptation planning, requires networking at all scales, from the community and city level to the regional and national level for both public authorities and the private sectors and civil society. For this reason REACHOUT is using City Hubs as anchors to advance climate services.
Adaptation to climate change needs to be integrated with other, non-climatic priorities. Therefore, cities’ responses vary between countries, regions and communities and require a tailored approach. The number of cities and towns committed to acting on climate change has grown substantially in Europe. However, when it comes to the implementation of climate actions (especially considering urban adaptation) the range of development between cities is still quite large. REACHOUT aims to capture this diversity and select cities that have a natural leading and exemplary role within their networks (hubs) so they can serve as accelerators for upscaling.
The City Hub approach of REACHOUT therefore particularly entails:
- City hubs are located in regions across Europe ensuring diversity both in terms of climate vulnerabilities and socio-economic development.
- Designated city hubs have a main city with experience and capacity in using climate services to advance their climate planning and climate and resilience governance arrangements, such as resilience or climate teams and officers. The main cities often have support from C40 and/or R-Cities Chief Resilience Officers and Climate Advisors and stronger connections with the local research institutes.
- City hubs have strong institutional connections and relationships with other cities and towns (with usually weaker adaptive capacities) in their periphery and broader region. This will create regional and national clusters that will facilitate institutionalization, provide economies of scale, and influence the broader policy ecosystem.
REACHOUT works with one direct beneficiary in each city hub as active partner in the consortium; in this way optimal use can be made of the partners’ deep knowledge of the local social economic and policy conditions and their existing working and decision-making structures. The approach of using the city hubs as cases for co-creation of services allows to build on existing experience and peer to peer learning among the broader ecosystem within the City Hub and guarantee a strong local level ownership through active involvement of urban authorities, private sector, and civil society through innovative bottom-up interdisciplinary approaches. Seven city hubs have been selected for this process: