LIFE LOCAL ADAPT
Integration of climate change adaptation into the work of local authorities
Climate change adaptation is a demanding challenge for small to medium-sized municipalities. Nevertheless, in many European countries the responsibility for building, maintaining and adapting local infrastructure is with the municipalities, either at city level or at the level of regional planning authorities. LIFE LOCAL ADAPT strives towards meeting these challenges and providing solutions.
In order to improve the resilience of European municipalities and regions to adverse negative impacts of climate change such as heavy rain, heat and drought, four key objectives are:
- Implementation of specific climate change adaptation measures in cooperation with municipalities
- Integration of climate change adaptation into the administrative practice of local authorities
- Enhancing the knowledge of municipalities on climate change adaptation
- Improving the data and information base on climate change impacts
To realize the implementation of specific measures on the local level, municipal knowledge and capacities must be increased. Updated data and information on climate change impacts, risks and vulnerabilities are a prerequisite to a profound knowledge transfer which enables decision makers to take the right decisions and to integrate climate change adaptation into their administrative practice.
Six partners from four Europe member states (Germany, Austria, Czech Republic and Latvia) will bring in their valuable experience and proficiency into LIFE LOCAL ADAPT. In the course of the five-year project they will strive to enhance the capacity of municipalities to cope with the impacts of climate change and will contribute remarkably to the implementation of the EU Strategy on Adaptation to Climate Change.
The Climate Service Center Germany contributes to this project by providing local climate information for the specific case study sites, by ensuring transferability of concepts and methods, and setting up the communication strategy.
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LIFE LOCAL ADAPT: Transfer of successfully tested approaches and measures to support small and medium-sized municipalities in climate change adaptation
Within the framework of LIFE LOCAL ADAPT, a variety of methodological approaches, instruments and adaptation measures were tested in response to different impacts of climate change in the four pilot regions of Saxony, Styria, the north-western Czech Republic and Valka in Latvia. The work included all steps from (1) climate data preparation, (2) integration of climate change information into decision-making processes, (3) identification of possible measures to their (4) implementation. All this has been done in a joint discussion and development process with the local decision-makers and has taken into account the specific challenges and circumstances in small and medium-sized municipalities (up to 100,000 inhabitants). A Guidance Document was developed in the project so that the solutions developed for the points mentioned (1) to (4) can be easily transferred to other regions and countries and applied there.
The Guidance Document consists of a transfer concept and three main sections describing the climate adaptation products and measures developed in the LIFE LOCAL ADAPT project. First, the transfer concept explains which steps a municipality should go through in order to identify and successfully implement suitable climate adaptation products and measures. The concept takes into account the current state of knowledge as well as the already existing climate adaptation measures of the municipality with the help of three different modules.
The three main sections in the Guidance Document, which represent the different modules in the transfer concept, are subdivided as follows:
(A) Improving the information base for adaptation planning,
(B) Supporting tools for providing climate information, and
(C) Guidance and communication for integrating the information into local decision-making processes.
In each module, best practice examples of successfully tested products, methods and approaches are presented in detail using step-by-step explanations. Subsequently, all other developed products and services related to it are presented briefly. A digital format was chosen for the dissemination of the document so that cross-links between the individual modules and external sources of further information can be established in a simple way.
Transfer of LIFE LOCAL ADAPT - Products and Services // Guidance Document (6,0 MB)
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