The RESIST project – Regions for climate change resilience through Innovation, Science and Technology, is a five-year initiative, started in January 2023, funded by the European Union to enhance climate resilience across European regions. With an overall budget of €26.7 million, RESIST brings together 56 partners from multiple countries, impacting 22 million citizens through innovative climate adaptation solutions. The project focuses on developing, testing, and implementing 100 climate change adaptation (CCA) solutions using advanced digital technologies such as Digital Twins. ACCENT SUD acts as communication and dissemination partner within the consortium.

Mission and Objectives

RESIST aims to build climate resilience through regional collaboration, knowledge transfer, and market-driven adaptation solutions. Its key objectives include:

• Testing adaptation pathways in four leading regions (Southwest Finland, Central Denmark, Catalonia, and Central Portugal) to assess climate resilience strategies.
• Transferring successful models to eight twinned regions (Normandy, Eastern Macedonia & Thrace, Blekinge, Zemgale, Baixo Alentejo, Puglia, Vesterålen, and Extremadura).
• Focusing on five key climate challenges: floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, and soil erosion.
• Engaging key stakeholders (civil society, policymakers, private sector, and scientists) in a quintuple helix model.
• Accelerating market deployment of at least 100 new climate adaptation solutions to reduce risks and enhance sustainability.

Regional Testing and Pairing System

RESIST adopts a multi-regional pairing approach, where each leading region is paired with two less experienced regions:

• Southwest Finland: Droughts, floods, soil erosion.
• Central Denmark: Floods, soil erosion.
• Catalonia: Floods, droughts, heatwaves, wildfires.
• Central Portugal: Droughts, heatwaves, wildfires, soil erosion.
• Twinned regions receive targeted knowledge transfer and digital twin simulations to apply adaptation strategies.

Strategic Approach

The project operates within the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change framework and integrates:

• Regional Demonstrations: Implementing practical climate adaptation measures in real environments.
• Digital Twin Technology: Covering 84,000 km², enabling real-time data visualization and impact modeling.
• Policy Development: Supporting regional and national authorities in implementing data-driven policies.
• Capacity Building: Training local actors to effectively address climate challenges.

Market-Driven Adaptation and Long-Term Sustainability

One of RESIST’s key goals is to integrate climate adaptation solutions into the market, ensuring long-term sustainability beyond the project’s lifecycle. This involves:

• Reducing time-to-market for climate solutions by supporting business development and financing opportunities.
• Encouraging collaboration between Digital Innovation Hubs, testbeds, incubators, and investors.
• Fostering green job creation and economic growth in climate adaptation sectors.

Expected Outcomes

By the end of the project, RESIST aims to achieve:

• Enhanced regional climate resilience in participating areas.
• Scalable adaptation models that can be replicated across Europe.
• Informed policymaking integrating scientific research with actionable solutions.
• Stronger public engagement and awareness of climate resilience initiatives.

Conclusion

Through its holistic and collaborative approach, RESIST is setting a new standard for climate adaptation. By combining cutting-edge digital tools, regional cooperation, and market-driven innovation, the project will build a sustainable, resilient future for European communities.

Started the 1st September 2023, ADT4Blue is a 3-year project co-financed by the Interreg Atlantic Area programme of the European Commission and run by a consortium of 13 project partners from France, Ireland, Portugal and Spain.

ADT4Blue will contribute to develop, implement, and scale business ideas addressing Blue Economy challenges through the usage of Advanced Digital Technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain and IoT. 

METHODOLOGY

1. Identification of local Blue Economy challenges.
2. Sourcing students, alumni, early-stage entrepreneurs (including seniors) from the inter-regional ecosystem. ADT4Blue plan to launch at least 3 Open Calls.
3. Provide training, workshops, mentorship and support to find initial funding or customers to bootstrap their ventures. Training programs will address different roles including business, solutions’ architects, and developers. They will also focus on data-value chains, leveraging European Dataspaces initiatives.

CREST – Climate-Resilient Coastal Urban Infrastructures Through Digital Twinning, is a 3-year project started on 1st April 2022, run by a consortium of 9 partners from France, Poland and Norway, and co-financed by the ERA-NET Cofund Urban Transformation Capacities (ENTUC) of the JPI Urban Europe Programme of the European Commission (in France, under the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR), the National Research Agency).

CREST goal is exploring a new methodology to empower vulnerable coastal urban areas to face the challenge of climate change adaptation through a groundbreaking initiative leveraging Augmented Reality (AR) built on AugmentCity Digital Twin technology and co-creation approaches.

By setting-up and rolling-out collaborative platforms though Digital Twinning and co-creation activities engaging local citizens and communities, based on citizen science and participatory methodologies, CREST wants to support and empower environmental decision-making and innovative policy practices, enabling robust and resilient responses to climate change.

Climate change largely impacts urban life. Extreme temperatures have an impact on sea level rise and, subsequently, nefarious events such as floods, droughts and storms have costly impacts on cities’ basic services, infrastructure, housing, livelihoods and health. Cities are responsible for 75% of CO2 emissions, and so its stakeholders must come forward with out of the box solutions to promote innovation and stimulate urban resilience by limiting negative impacts of climate change.

But for a problem to be addressed, it must first be seen and felt. Visualization is a potential way of increasing engagement with climate change, and IT developments, such as Artificial Intelligence and Augmented Reality, provide significant advancements that can be transformative in engaging audiences with climate change issues. This is at the basis of AugmentCity which developed an innovative way to operate Digital Twins (DT) of cities, enabling data and “what-if” scenarios to be analysed and visualized in an interactive and immersive visualisation tool to be used by policy-makers, researchers, companies and citizens. Our project builds on AugmentCity and apply it in terms of demonstration, co-creation and mobilization of stakeholders for capacity-building and collective decision-making in 3 European urban areas for resilient urban infrastructure adaptation to climate change.

OBJECTIVES

Objective 1

Develop and implement a monitoring and impact assessment framework for sustainability and climate resilience

Objective 2

Create Graphical Digital Twins (DTs), an innovative engagement and decision support for urban transformation

Objective 3

Promote capacity building and co-creation for greater resilience of urban infrastructure

Objective 4

Develop pathways for the future uptake and replication of CREST results

Objective 5

Broad citizen and stakeholder engagement for greater resilience and adaptation to CC