The European Commission’s research and innovation policy aims to position the EU as a leader in innovating with nature to achieve more sustainable and resilient societies. To achieve this, the Commission is directing funds into projects that propose nature-based solutions to fight climate change and biodiversity loss, while improving health and creating jobs.
A pinnacle of this effort is the Horizon Europe topic “HORIZON-MISS-2022-CLIMA-01-06: Testing and demonstrating transformative solutions on climate resilience, mainstreaming nature based solutions in the systemic transformation”. This topic is a part of the European Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change.
Almost 140 million € has been awarded to seven funded projects, making it one of the largest Horizon Europe topics.
In addition to CARDIMED, funded projects include:
- ARCADIA – Transformative Climate Resilience by Nature-Based Solutions in the Continental Bio-Geographical Region
- DesirMED – Demonstration and mainstrEaming of nature-based Solutions for clImate Resilient transformation in the MEDiterranean
- MountResilience – Accelerating transformative climate adaptation for higher resilience in European mountain regions
- LAND4CLIMATE – Utilization of Private Land for Mainstreaming Nature-Based Solution in the Systemic Transformation Towards a Climate-Resilient Europe
- NBRACER – Nature Based Solutions for Atlantic Regional Climate Resilience
- NATALIE – Accelerating and mainstreaming transformative NATure-bAsed solutions to enhance resiLIEence to climate change for diverse bio-geographical European regions
Having in mind that different regions are facing different climate risks, each project is focusing on a specific biogeographical region in Europe. The project will develop place-based solutions specifically addressing local particularities of those areas.
Those so-called sister projects are all together working with around 70 regions and municipalities. This is greatly contributing to the objective of the Mission Clima to accompany by 2030 at least 150 towards climate resilience.
CARDIMED has established communication with the sister projects, exploring potential synergies and common activities. The projects are trying to form a coalition – aiming to increase the impact and outreach, which would otherwise be impossible to achieve separately.
Actions already taken include attendance of CARDIMED project coordinator Simos Malamis at the ARCADIA project meeting in January 2024 in Bologna, Italy. This meeting was the first attempt of the familiarising projects among each other through a series of project presentations.
In February 2024, CARDIMED was invited to Venice, Italy, to meet with DesirMED. DesirMED (as CARDIMED) is specifically focusing on the Mediterranean region. During the meeting, CARDIMED’s project manager Tadej Stepisnik Perdih, discussed potential activities for regions that are targeted by both projects.
Lastly, in March 2024 the project coordinators of DesirMED and NATALIE held a presentation during the CARDIMED online project meeting, uncovering the plethora of complementing technologies, solutions and approaches that projects can offer to regions in order to improve their climatic resilience.
