Tailormade climate services for cities - the REACHOUT Triple-A-Toolkit

The last mile in climate service delivery should be the next step in cities’ climate adaptation

REACHOUT is a research and innovation project by the EU (Green Deal H2020) and coordinated by Deltares and Stichting CAS. Seven European cities participated in REACHOUT: Amsterdam, Milan, Athens, Cork, Gdynia, Lillestrøm and Logroño. Other partners included Tecnalia (Spain), University College Cork (Ireland), NGI (Norway), Sendzimir foundation (Poland), VU (Netherlands), Ecologic Institute (Germany) and CMCC (Italy).

The project started in 2021 in response to a call from the EU Green Deal on the development of user-oriented climate services with the central question: “How to bridge the last mile in climate service delivery?” Rather than asking how we bridge the last mile in delivering relevant climate information to users, we found that the perspective better is reversed: What do users need for their next step in the adaptation journey?

To arrive at its conclusions, REACHOUT co-developed tailored climate adaptation tools with 7 city partners across Europe, in three development cycles. The cities represented various levels of maturity in climate adaptation and offered ideal test cases for exploring what sort of tools or what combination of tools connect best to the diverse cities’ needs and what innovations are needed in the tools itself or what barriers in the enabling environment (termed city hub business model) should be overcome?

The scope of climate services has been broadened with the triple-A approach

Traditional climate services focus heavily on risk assessments and often lead to incremental rather than transformational adaptation. To truly accelerate adaptation, cities and regions need a broader and more integrated set of climate services that align with their long-term resilience goals.

Inspired by the climate stress test approach developed in the Dutch Delta program, REACHOUT applied a triple-A framework to structure the over 20 climate service tools that were further developed with the cities, into tools for climate risk and vulnerability analysis, tools to prioritize risk and set ambition for adaptation, and tools that can support action planning. The addition of an ambition setting step really made the difference with more traditional approaches and allowed the cities to zoom out and integrate adaptation with other urban development ambitions such as on greening the city, reducing traffic or tackling equity issues. To support the latter, tools to map social vulnerability were combined with tools for flood and heat risks. See also: Ambition setting through climate services to drive climate resilient development - ScienceDirect

With this project, we have translated the successful Dutch stress test approach for cities to other countries. At the same time, we also gathered a lot of knowledge in the other countries. And because we change the frame from what we don't want (climate risks) to what we do want (climate-adaptive cities), the enthusiasm for adaptation and thus the need for climate service tools and data will increase.

Project leaders Ad Jeuken (Deltares) and Hasse Goosen (CAS)

Access to the services, demonstration of successful applications and a learning program are available at triple-A-Toolkit.eu

The most important tangible end result of the project is a platform Triple-A Toolkit which functions as a marketplace between potential users of the tools (municipalities, consultants) and providers. Here, users can find information in various ways about which tools are most suitable for their question whether it is on tackling heat, flooding, prioritizing the most vulnerable groups, or exploring options for nature-based solutions. Guidance is provided on the level of effort required, what levels of support can be provided and what else is needed to use the tools.

During the project ‘Climate stories’ were developed by the cities themselves in which ArcGIS Story maps were used to translate the outcomes of the tools to narratives that relate to citizens’ experiences. For example, in Athens an older woman Sofia and her grandchildren are introduced an followed during their day to day activities during a hot summer.

How the cities used the tools to inform present day policy needs is demonstrated in the ‘City Solutions’ section. This section is organized around a few common challenges that cities have: How can I protect my city from flooding while expanding and growing? How can we guaranty healthy living under extreme heat?; How can small cities with low capacity start with adaptation? Where to build Nature-based solutions to be most effective? How can we adapt and leave no-one behind? How can we protect assets and investments?

In addition, the web portal contains condensed learning modules that were developed and provided during the project.

REACHOUT helped Lillestrøm to better cooperate with residents on stormwater management.

Einar Flaa, coordination and climate adaptation from the REACHOUT City Hub Lillestrøm municipality

Main lessons

The main lessons are that in every application a certain degree of ‘tailoring’ is needed and that a knowledge broker is always needed to be able to use the potential of climate services locally. This cannot be organised by European organisations such as Copernicus or JRC alone. An important role seems to be reserved for national platforms, but cities also need to invest in their own data policy and build up knowledge and expertise.

Role of Deltares

Besides formally leading the project, Deltares had the role as climate service tool developer in the project. As such it was involved in co-developing and testing various tools with several cities, such as the FloodAdapt tool in Cork, the Climate resilient City Toolbox (CRCTool) in Lillestrom, Gdynia and Athens and a new approach for ‘Climate Resilient Development Pathways’ in which climate adaptation and mitigation and urban development tasks are considered integrally, in Cork and Logroño.