Climate change impacts are here and now. The impacts on people, prosperity and planet are already pervasive but unevenly distributed, as stated in the new EU Blueprint strategy (European Commission-EC, 2019). To reduce climate-related risks, the EC and the IPCC agree that transformational adaptation is essential. The TranformAr project aims to develop and demonstrate products and services to launch and accelerate large-scale and disruptive adaptive process for transformational adaptation in vulnerable regions and communities across Europe. The 6 TransformAr lighthouse demonstrators face a common challenge: water-related risks and impacts of climate change. Based on existing successful initiatives, the project will develop, test and demonstrate solutions and pathways, integrated in Innovation Packages, in 6 territories. Transformational pathways, including an integrated risk assessment approach are co-developed by means of 9 Transformational Adaptive Blocks. A set of 22 tested actionable adaptive solutions are tested and demonstrated, ranging from nature-based solutions, innovative technologies, financing, insurance and governance models, awareness and behavioral change solutions. The project team, led by the University of Antwerp, gathers 22 partners from 11 countries and a well-balanced mix of sectoral and adaptation experts (5 RTOs and 1 SME), paired with 6 territories (4 local authorities and 2 charities), 8 additional solutions providers and 1 EU water-related NPO specialized that will support to structure a European Community of practice. Massive resilience increase and acceleration of transformation adaptation will be fostered by clustering various investors, testing bankable solutions, and defining viable (non-)commercial exploitation strategy for the TransformAr solutions, products and services.

Urgent accelerated action is required to adapt to unavoidable and ongoing climate change. Climate-resilient investments must be substantially scaled up. Public budgets will not be able to address the adaptation financing challenge alone, financing from the private sector will also be necessary. CLIMATEFIT contributes to bridging the resilience financing gap by providing critical insight and building the capacities of Public Authorities (PAs) to attract and orchestrate various public and private funding & financing sources, and of Financing and Investment Entities (FIEs) to discover and access resilient investment opportunities. CLIMATEFIT will experiment on a mix of 20 territories in Southern, Eastern and Northwestern Europe in their transformational pathways towards climate resilience. The journey will start by taking stock of funding & financing barriers and enablers gathered in the Financing Landscape taxonomy. CLIMATEFIT will create an ingenious Manual for leveraging finance to, 1) co-design 20 innovative investment strategies allowing to identify sources of funding 2) develop 10 credible and scalable investment plans to help better negotiate and articulate financing streams and define investment concepts, and 3) pilot 4 bankable, tailored investment cases. CLIMATEFIT will build a Pathway for FIEs to accelerate finance, test refined methods to reward climate-resilient investment and apply smart adaptation funding and financing solutions. It will establish Local Resilience Taskforces (LRTs) composed of PAs and FIEs that propose a catalytic and systemic approach to resilience financing. Led by WCF, the high-level consortium will build capacity, co-create solutions with PAs and FIEs, and inform EU adaptation and sustainable finance policies. Finally, CLIMATEFIT aims to boost resilience financing in Europe by consolidating the dynamics in LRTs, and to promote and scale its research findings through the European Network of LRTs and its user-oriented One-Stop Shop.

SystR will propose a groundbreaking approach to feed the science-policy nexus with innovative solutions to address systemic risks (interconnection between multiple sectors and stakeholders and resulting cascading climate impacts). This approach will accelerate transformative adaptation and avoid maladaptation by breaking silos, harmonising multiple scales of governance and tailoring solutions to local needs and strengths with Smart Specialisation Strategies. SystR will deliver a set of innovative results that will collectively strengthen the systemic resilience of the 6 multi-scale regions and communities involved and have a long lasting impact: 1. An Adaptation Support tool targeting the process of systemic adaptation based on the P2R project Regional Resilience Journey 2. A Community Empowerment framework for actively mobilising a diversity of actors across the value chain into the development and testing of transformative solutions, fit to address local climate and aggravating systemic vulnerabilities and risks 3. Novel systemic Governance schemes to improve cooperation at multiple scales 4. Coherent Financial roadmaps to determine how to finance identified resilience solutions and strategies 5. Design, with the support of the digital Visualisation tools, and implement Integrated Ecosystem of Resilience Solutions, integrating the cross sectorial enabling and systemic physical solutions including NBS 6. Accelerate the uptake of its results for critical mass creation, through the Upscaling toolbox and the One Stop Shop, the SystR’s results aggregator. Overall, while pursuing close collaboration with the Climate Adaptation Mission, SystR will demonstrate systemic resilience in three contexts most representative of Europe: coastal in Guadeloupe-France, rural in Bystrica-Slovakia and urban in Rome-Italy, which will be twinned with replication sites of similar challenges, Galicia, Strasbourg and Egaleo, respectively.