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:

Amsterdam – APG

REACHOUT is catering the city hub Amsterdam, with APG as main hub partner, to address climate services for the financial sector. APG is a Dutch pension investor and their Global Responsible Investment & Governance team integrates climate risk information into investment analysis.

Milano

One of the biggest Metropolis of Italy located in the region of Lombardy with more than 1 million inhabitants. The city is mostly exposed to pluvial flooding, extreme wind and heatwaves. Milan has a city Masterplan with a vision towards 2030, which introduces a resilience approach in built context and public spaces, emphasizing increasing green areas to reduce the impact of climate change. The city has also drafted the first integrated Air & Climate Action Plan to identify priority measures for air quality and climate change mitigation and adaptation.

Athens

Athens is a very large city located the Attica region and it is the capital of Greece. The Municipality of Athens, which constitutes a small administrative unit of the entire city, has over 600 thousand inhabitants. The city is mostly exposed to Pluvial flooding and heatwaves. Athens is updating its climate plan and is working with EIB’s Natural Capital Financing Facility on a set of flagship adaptation projects. The City has also experience in working with Rebuild by Design on climate resilience projects.

Cork

Cork is a city of more than two hundred thousand people and is the second largest urban population in Ireland. The main climate hazards facing Cork City are hydrological – both fluvial and coastal. Cork is situated close to the coast in the valley of the River Lee with the city centre located on an island between dividing streams of the river. Cork has a long history of flooding. In 2009, for instance, major damage was caused by flood waters to educational, commercial and residential buildings. Additionally, tidal floods from the Atlantic Ocean through the outer and inner harbours threaten the city centre and surrounding areas.

Gdynia

Gdynia is located on Gdańsk Bay on the southern coast of the Baltic Sea, it is a major seaport and the second-largest city in the Pomeranian Voivodeship after Gdańsk. Gdynia has a population around 250.000 citizens. The city belongs to the Metropolitan Area Gdańsk-Gdynia-Sopot with more than 1.5 million citizens.

Lillestrøm

The Municipality of Lillestrøm is Norway’s ninth largest municipality, with a population greater than 86,000 residents, and its administrative centre, the town of Lillestrøm, is located in the greater Oslo metropolitan area. The Municipality of Lillestrøm was founded in 2020 as a merger between three former municipalities (Skedsmo, Fet, and Sørum). The municipality is transected by the Glomma river, Norway’s longest and most voluminous river, ending in Northern Europe’s largest inland delta, the Northern Øyeren. The municipality is mostly exposed to natural hazard from floods and landslides, especially quick clay slides.

Logroño

Logroño is a medium size city located in the north of Spain in the region of La Rioja with more than 150 thousand inhabitants. This city is mostly exposed to heatwaves, floods and droughts. The city of Logroño aims to become a European Green Capital working hard on energy efficiency, sustainable development, clean mobility, and urban naturalization.