UNIMONT, the University of Milan centre is the lead institution for the project “MountResilience – Accelerating transformative climate change adaptation for higher resilience in European Mountain Regions.” Starting in September 2023, the project will involve 47 partners, including research centres, universities, innovation agencies, regions, and small municipalities from 13 European countries.
For over 25 years, UNIMONT, which involves 9 departments of the University of Milan coordinated by the Department of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences (DISAA), has been promoting activities in education, research, and third mission initiatives for sustainable development in mountain areas through dialogue with local, supra-local, and European stakeholders. Drawing from this experience, UNIMONT will coordinate MountResilience, the first project entirely dedicated to mountains, funded by the European Commission under the Horizon Europe Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change. The project’s objective is to test and create a database of potential adaptation actions to address the effects of climate change on mountain regions, thus enhancing the resilience of local communities.
The project will involve 10 mountain communities and regions from 9 European countries, located in the Alps, Carpathians, Pyrenees, and Northern Mountains. UNIMONT, the University of Milan centre, will support the implementation of solutions by coordinating pilot communities and establishing a portfolio of Nature-Based Solutions and innovation in various sectors such as winter tourism, water consumption in agriculture, energy saving and efficiency, land use, and biodiversity conservation.
“This research project addresses a crucial theme: the effects of climate change are becoming increasingly evident, and developing strategies to address them adequately, mitigate their impacts, and perhaps even obtain some benefits is a priority,” says Prof.ssa Giorgi, head of UNIMONT at the University of Milan and Scientific Coordinator of the Horizon Europe MountResilience project. She adds, “It is really urgent and must be tackled together at a European level, sharing best practices and identifying new ones, especially in unique and vulnerable territorial contexts like mountain areas, where the University of Milan has been working for years in close collaboration with local and national/international stakeholders.”
These solutions will be implemented by 6 pilot communities – Tyrol (Austria), Gabrovo (Bulgaria), Râu Sadului (Romania), Valais (Switzerland), and Lapland (Finland). They will engage with actors from the quadruple helix (business, public administration, research, civil society) and use open innovation as well as participatory and co-design processes to mobilize, involve, and reach local communities and key stakeholders to promote sustainable development in their territories. The 4 “replicator” communities – Autonomous Region of Friuli-Venezia Giulia (Italy), Catalonia (Spain), Primorje-Gorski Kotar County (Croatia), and Podkarpackie (Poland) – will replicate the tested technological and social adaptation solutions from the pilot communities and the lessons learned, through special capacity-building initiatives, to increase their adaptation capacity.
The MountResilience project will officially commence with a kick-off meeting, where the entire project partnership will gather for three days (19th-21st September, 2023) in Ponte di Legno, Alta Valle Camonica (BS). The kick-off meeting will facilitate discussion and the exchange of best practices with all key stakeholders in mountain regions to identify the main climate change-induced risks in European mountainous areas that the project will focus on over the next 54 months.
SAVE THE DATE
The project will be the focus of a dissemination event, centered on climate change and the need to promote innovation in mountainous territories, involving national and European institutions and organized during FUTURA EXPO, Economia X l’Ambiente – the sustainability fair organized by the Chamber of Commerce of Brescia and ProBrixia, involving universities, businesses, and governance from 8th to 10th October 2023 at Brixia Forum.