The RESCCUE project (RESilience to cope with Climate Change in Urban arEas, www.resccue.eu) was born in May 2016. It was Europe’s first large-scale innovation and urban resilience project, aimed at improving the capability of cities to anticipate, prepare for, respond to, and recover from significant multihazard threats, with minimum damage.
The RESCCUE approach turned a new page by leaving sectorial approaches behind, by considering cities as networks of interdependent systems. The four-year project went beyond the conventional analysis of the impacts of climate change on single critical infrastructures, such as energy, water or transportation. RESCCUE’s perspective was a holistic one, focusing on interconnections rather than on separate city units of the urban infrastructure networks.
The objective of RESCCUE was to produce a set of models and tools to analyse urban resilience based on a multisectoral approach, to overcome current difficulties related to a lack of information integration of the different urban services. To interconnect sectoral models, the project takes advantage of the RESCCUE tools and methodologies as the basis of further software developments able to perform the assessment, management and planning of urban resilience in an integrated way.
The three cities included as pilot sites (Barcelona, Lisbon and Bristol) were the validation platforms of the RESCCUE tool, where integrated analyses of urban resilience were performed throughout the project.
The resilience roadmap for these cities, in the form of a Resilience Action Plan (RAP), was one of the key results of the project. Produced at the very end, each presented the strategic lines on which the city must focus, considering also the concrete measures that will be applied to solve specific problems. Nonetheless, these results not only aim at providing an overview of the resilience building in Barcelona, Bristol and Lisbon, but are intended to help many other cities around the world build their capacity to adapt to current and future shocks and stresses.
Taking advantage of the Clarity CSIS platform, some of the RESCCUE results can be seen in the following sections, presenting the main maps for Barcelona with regards to Hazard, Vulnerability and Risks in the city:
