Development of a multi-level resilience strategy for urban areas and river basins to extreme weather conditions

The dire consequences of climate change being experienced at present, emphasizes more than ever the urgency to accelerate the transition to increased climate and water resilience in urban and catchment areas. Growing awareness that dealing with extreme weather events requires an integration of temporal scales (short-term (forecast) to long term (foresight)), spatial scales (very local to catchment scale) and of objectives (minimizing risks and maximizing benefits). Current practice: focus on short term and local scales and miss opportunities to expand on multiple functionality. To achieve integration across these scales and objectives governance scales (multi-level governance) should be integrated. Existing grey infrastructure is not built to withstand the significant impact of the extreme floods and protect urban citizens and critical infrastructure that is needed for wellbeing and socioeconomic prosperity. Nature based solutions provide solutions, but the transition pathways towards those remain challenging: The complex interactions of local, regional and national policy requirements do not work synergetically, but often also hamper each other. How can policies be improved to give room for the realization of green-grey infrastructure, that withstands extreme weather events? The project will look into those policy systems in an integrated way, thereby opening up transition pathways towards a higher share of Blue Green Infrastructure (BGI) as opposed to the grey.