A EUROPEAN PROJECT FOR NATURAL WATER RESOURCES MANAGEMENT AND FOR A RESILIENT TERRITORY

BEWARE project (BEtter Water Management for Advancing Resilient Communities in Europe), co-funded by the European Union LIFE Programme aims to improve hydraulic safety and territorial resilience in Altovicentino area, Vicenza Province (Italy).

It promotes the adoption of sustainable interventions through a participatory approach that actively involves interested stakeholders, encouraging them to adopt actions to reduce flood damages caused by the heavy rains that increasingly occur in the territory.

COMING SOON

Life Beware will join The Nature of City Festival taking place from 29th to 31st March 2022

Life Beware will take part in The Nature of City Festival (TNOC), an annual experiment in a multidisciplinary collaboration designed to go beyond borders to radically imagine our cities of the future. The Festival, which was developed by the Nature of Cities Organization in collaboration with a wide variety of global stakeholders, is taking place online on March 29-31 2022.

The program of Life Beware activities will be released soon, stay tuned.

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PROJECT NEWS

The presentation event of the AltoVicentino Mayors Adapt Strategy was a success

The Altovicentino Mayors Adapt Strategy is online on the LIFE Beware website! On the 14th of December 2021 the Adaptation Plan for AltoVicentino was successfully presented to more than 50 participants coming from different realities. It is the result of a participatory process that turned out to be an innovative experience both for its character of participation "experiment" and for the results and contents developed. →

LIFE BEWARE at the 8th International Conference on Landscape and Urban Horticulture

The 8th International Conference on Urban Landscape and Horticulture organised by the International Society for Horticulture, the Department of Agriculture, Food and Environment of the University of Catania and the Institute for Research on Terrestrial Ecosystems of the CNR was held online from the 15th to the 17th of December 2021. The event saw the Department of Land, Environment, Agriculture and Forestry of the University of Padua, a partner in the LIFE Beware project, draw attention to the issues and some of the results of the project itself. →

The LIFE Purchasing Group is born!

With the aim of reducing the price of water resilience interventions at home, the first meeting of the Life Beware Purchasing Group members was held on Monday December the 20th. The second meeting, during which some estimates will already be shared, is scheduled for January the 24th. Participation is free and open to all citizens, including those who did not attend the first meeting. The objective is to spread throughout the territory a series of small actions that, added together, benefit the entire community, leading, by the very fact of being replicated on a domestic scale, to an increasingly widespread, as well as conscious, hydraulic resilience. →

BEWARE, BE INSPIRED!

Andromeda Project (A New integrateD hydROgeological Model to assEss landsliDes and flood prone Areas in Oltrepò Pavese)

The Andromeda project, funded by Fondazione Cariplo, and officially launched in May 2018, aims to develop a method for identifying the triggering moments of surface landslides and floods in some sample basins of the Oltrepò Pavese, based on innovative models that also exploit satellite data of rainfall and soil moisture. The project, carried out by DSTA and DICAR of the University of Pavia and CNR-IRPI, will thus produce a prototype warning system for defining the areas of the Oltrepò Pavese at greatest hydro-geological risk. →

CREATING A NETWORK AMONG PROJECTS

The LIFE Programme of the European Union is co-funding a wide variety of projects that involve public and private entities, civil society organisations and other stakeholders, in the implementation of measures and strategies for climate change adaptation. The LIFE BEWARE project is committed to building a network of projects

and initiatives for soil conservation, sustainable management of natural resources, promotion of environmental governance, biodiversity conservation and much more. In the section below, three important projects about the sustainable use of soil and flood risk mitigation are presented!

LIFE in RUNOFF

The LIFE in RUNOFF Project aims to tackle frequent runoffs due to sudden heavy rainfall in a sustainable way.
Budapest’s Hegyvidék district, one of the Hungarian capital’s 23 municipalities, has launched a large-scale project aiming to help urban areas adapt to climate change by introducing innovative solutions for managing stormwater. An ambitious collaboration between other municipalities, NGOs and the private sector, the project is set to close in mid-2025.

A mountainous area on the Western edge of Hungary’s capital city, Hegyvidék has over the past decade suffered an ever increasing frequency of sudden floods due to heavy rainfall. Apart from causing material damage to residential properties, the stormwater also represents a wasted opportunity when it is simply drained into the overloaded sewer system, instead of being captured and utilized in dryer periods.

Contrary to the common misconception, climate change brings about more extreme weather phenomena: storms become heavier, droughts become longer. Hegyvidék’s LIFE in RUNOFF project aims to mitigate these extremities to promote urban water management sustainability. Various surveys (local and regional models) will be carried out over the course of 1.5 years to determine the district’s infrastructural vulnerabilities and top points of intervention. Then, a number of demonstration actions will follow, aiming to increase stormwater storage capacity and come up with other management tools. An important aspect of the project is that it will not only focus on larger-scale solutions, but will also emphasize private small-scale solutions by creating complex multilevel ecosystem-based management models and grants (for example green roofs). From the stakeholder point of view, from the beginning of the project we aim to set up an expert platform to bridge the knowledge gap between the different actors and start a dialogue. With the data gathered we will integrate local climate change adaptation into local policies.

The LIFE in RUNOFF project named “Mainstreaming climate change adaptation into urban planning by demonstrating public & private stormwater infrastructure” has started in June 2021, and is carried out by a partnership between Budapest 12^th District Municipality (Hegyvidék) as lead partner, Budapest 7^th District Municipality (Erzsébetváros), Budapest 18^th District Municipality (Pestszentlőrinc-Pestszentimre), the City of Budapest, an NGO called Association of Climate Friendly Municipalities and the expert company Trinity Enviro.

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VerdeVale

Urban greenery is a strategic asset for the city of the future. Almost four out of five European citizens live in cities, and their quality of life largely depends on the quality of the urban environment that surrounds them.

The focus of the VERDEVALE PROJECT is the constitution of a cross-border community of good practices between small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and local authorities, aimed at the design and field testing of innovative methodologies for the management of urban green areas, to enhance their environmental, cultural and economic value. This issue is particularly relevant in the Alpine context, where the project is taking place, to make the Alpine region sustainable and attractive from an environmental point of view, while at the same time improving the competitiveness of companies operating in the area. Companies in the sector can thus improve their competitiveness by enhancing the ecosystem services that urban green spaces offer to the city. The two experimental areas of the project are the cities of Lugano and Bolzano, both administrative capitals with over 70,000 inhabitants and cities of primary importance. Moreover, both Lugano and Bolzano are characterized by a strong anthropization and a particularly high vulnerability to the effects of climate change, due to their position on the valley floor, where rainfall flows and traffic and pollution are concentrated.

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This newsletter has been produced with the financial assistance of the European Union under the LIFE. The contents of it are the sole responsibility of the LIFE BEWARE Consortium and can under no circumstances be regarded as reflecting the position of the European Union.

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