MountResilience kicked-off in Ponte di Legno (Italy) on the 19th – 20th and 21st September 2023. MountResilience (Accelerating transformative climate adaptation for higher resilience in European mountain regions) targets mountain territories and their communities to help them adapt to climate change.

Funded by Horizon 2020 with a total budget of €15 million, the project will run until February 2028. It is coordinated by the University of Milan, through its University Centre of Excellence “Mountain University” (UNIMONT) dedicated to mountain studies. MountResilience brings together no less than 47 partners from all over Europe, representing the great diversity of mountain areas, actors and challenges. Several members of Euromontana are involved in MountResilience: UNIMONT (University of Milan) (Italy) as the coordinator, and three replicator partners: Podkarpackie Innovation Centre (Poland) at the local government of the Podkarpackie Province,the Center for Ecological Research and Forestry Applications CREAF (Spain) and the Italian National Union of Mountain Municipalities UNCEM (Italy). Euromontana will lead activities relevant to dissemination and policy recommendations. It will also build and run a Community of Practice to foster mutual learning on climate change adaptation in all European mountains.

4-year project to develop and implement concrete solutions throughout European mountain areas

As mountains face unprecedented challenges due to their higher sensitivity to climate change, adaptation and resilience are crucial. To this end, the project aims to accelerate the climate-resilient transformation of 10 European mountain regions.

Of these, 6 “demonstrator” regions will develop and test transformative solutions. The Romanian demonstrator site in Râu Sadalui will for instance focus on increasing the fertility of mountain meadows to support local farmers in the face of climate change (through field scanning, drone seeding …). The Finish Lapland demonstrator will aim at adapting the region’s nature-based livelihoods (relying essentially on reindeer herding and tourism) by providing them with specific data on the effects of climate change as well as adaptation plans and adequate coaching for the different stakeholders involved. The Piemonte region (Italy) and Canton Valais (Switzerland) will both focus on water monitoring and increasing the efficiency of its usage. The Austrian Tirol region will work on the adaptation of the tourism sector (both in winter and summer seasons) through developing nature-based offers and testing building adaptations for instance. Finally, the city of Gabrovo in Bulgaria will aim at improving the life of the local population in the face of climate change through greening the public infrastructures as well as developing an early warning and monitoring tool for risk management.

The remaining 4 regions will act as “replicators”, applying the solutions and lessons learned from the demo regions in their regions through special initiatives to improve their adaptive capacity. The replicator sites are located in: Catalonia (Spain), Friuli Venezia Giulia (Italy), Primorje-Gorski Kota County (Croatia) and Subcarpathian region (Poland)

The solutions that MountResilience aims to bring are nature-based at their core and will address the polical, governance and societal needs of the territories concerned.

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