Coordinator: National Technical University of Athens - NTUA
Scientific officer: Attilio Toscano
Research group: Attilio Toscano, Stevo Lavrnic, Gabriele Baroni
CARDIMED will introduce a framework to build Climate Resilience in the Mediterranean biogeographical region, effi-ciently unifying individual efforts of regions and communities across different countries and continents. This will be achieved by deploying the digital infrastructure to harmonise the data collection and evaluation processes, providing open data to all the actors involved in the Nature-based Solutions (NBS) value chain and integrating crucial functions for Climate Resilience. Among these functions, smart digital tools for citizen participation and capacity building will supplement an ambitious multi-stakeholder engagement strategy, focused on knowledge translation and impact path-ways. Furthermore, holistic modelling tools introducing the Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems (WEFE) Nexus approach will provide comprehensive knowledge on the complex NBS interfaces, that will decisively contribute to addressing socio-ecological challenges, along with issues of valuation and low-investment rate in NBS. These actions will be imple-mented across 9 demonstration sites, composed of 10 regions, 20 locations and 28 communities and comprising 47 NBS that directly relate to over 80 interventions and supporting units that tackle climate change and circularity challenges. The consolidation of the demonstrating regions and communities will establish the CARDIMED Regional Alliance, that will function as the vehicle for expanding the network via upscaling the existing sites and adding new ones. The project includes 5 transferability cases, as well as an additional 10 that will be defined during the implementation. Through these actions, the CARDIMED alliance will achieve at least 28 regions and 70 communities by 2030, will create 8000 jobs especially in the NBS sector, and will leverage over 450M€ in climate investment.