Urban Klima 2050 brings 10 LIFE projects together in a session on climate governance
17/12/2021
- The LIFE NAdapta CC, SHARA, CLINOMICS, Good Local Adapt, URBANGREEN, UrbanProof, Plan Up, UNIFY and MICACC projects took part in an online seminar to share best practices, lessons learnt and successful tools for regional and local climate governance.
On Wednesday 15 December, the ‘Climate Governance’ networking session organised LIFE IP Urban Klima 2050 gathered together 10 LIFE projects in an online session. They shared the lessons learnt, best practices and success tools in regional and local climate governance. The event was also an opportunity to identify neutrality and resilience synergies and success stories that can be replicated.
Adolfo Uriarte, Director of Natural Heritage and Climate Change of the Basque Government’s Ministry of Economic Development, Sustainability and the Environment, welcomed the representatives of the participating projects and the delegates at the event (over 100 people followed the session online). During his speech, Uriarte stressed the importance of the recent Glasgow COP 26 Climate Change, where both the Basque Government and Urban Klima 2050 took part in several work sessions. “In the Basque Country, we signed the COP 26 and are committed to mitigation and adaption,” he explained. Furthermore, the Natural Heritage and Climate Change Director highlighted Urban Klima 2050 as “an example of networking with all the public authorities and research and technology centres involved”.
Mari Mar Alonso, the Ihobe Climate Action Director, then presented the LIFE IP Urban Klima 2050 which she defined as “a transformative project, which addresses mitigation, but is fundamentally focused on climate change adaptation, with a horizon up to 2025 to deploy the Basque Climate Change Strategy 2050 in the urban sphere”. On the other hand, the Climate Action Director and Urban Klima 2050 Coordinator stressed that the project is a “very important network of people. We are over 20 entities taking part, with the three levels of the Basque administration and research and technology centres involved”. Furthermore, Alonso recalled that Urban Klima 2050 “is an action project that acts on the territory”.
Presentation of LIFE projects operating at state and European level
The session continued with the different guest LIFE projects:
Regional and local climate governance discussed
The event ended with two round tables when the representatives of the guest LIFE projects discussed the different instruments to address climate governance from a regional perspective and from a local perspective. They stressed the importance of involving the different governance levels to answer climate change in a collaborative and coordinated way. Local authorities have a special role to play as they are at the forefront of climate change and have a better perception of how it affects the territory. Therefore, they need informed knowledge of the problem and have the necessary information and tools to facilitate their involvement.
Furthermore, the importance of involving other key stakeholders such as the general public, through participatory processes, or the NGOs that enable greater transparency and mobilisation of the players, was also stressed during the roundtables. Finally, the challenge was set to bring the private sector onboard, which will require external economic stimulus, such as the European funds.
Beyond the session
The speakers shared with the Urban Klima 2050 team the interest of this event as it provided a better understanding of how climate change adaptation is being focused in similar projects, and was also an opportunity to discover the barriers and lessons learnt that can be extracted from the different experiences. Everybody coincided on the importance of continuing to work together beyond organising such sessions, with the aim of being able to replicate experience and being able to develop new joint projects in the field of climate adaptation.
