This study presents the ClimEmpower framework, a user-driven approach to enhancing climate resilience across five climate-vulnerable regions in Southern Europe: Costa del Sol (Spain), Central Greece, the Troodos Mountains (Cyprus), Osijek-Baranja County (Croatia), and Sicily (Italy). The project employs a region-specific methodology that integrates climate risk assessments, stakeholder engagement through Communities of Practice (CoPs), and the development of innovative climate services tailored to local needs. These regions, characterized by unique environmental and socio-economic vulnerabilities, face shared hazards such as droughts, heatwaves, and floods, alongside region-specific challenges like salinization and biodiversity loss. ClimEmpower identifies critical gaps in high-resolution data, cross-sectoral collaboration, and capacity-building efforts, underscoring barriers to effective adaptation. This work aims to provide a foundational resource, offering a comprehensive overview of the current situation, including needs, gaps, priorities, and expectations across the target regions. By establishing this baseline, it facilitates future research and comparative analyses, contributing to the development of robust, region-specific resilience strategies. The ClimEmpower framework offers scalable and replicable solutions aligned with the European Green Deal’s climate resilience goals, advancing adaptation planning and providing actionable insights for broader European initiatives.

As climate change is an urgent global threat, the EU’s Green Deal aims to make Europe climate-neutral by 2050, while ensuring fair and sustainable implementation. Achieving this goal requires both mitigation and adaptation measures, with a focus on understanding the interactions and trade-offs between them. One major shortcoming of current modelling approaches is the omission of interactions between domain-specific models from various fields, as they often differ in their modelling approaches. However, this is crucial in understanding the full impact of mitigation and adaptation measures, as their impact cascades into many sectors.Among other demonstrator regions within the KNOWING project, future scenarios for the city of Tallinn (Estonia), incorporating traffic related mitigation and heat related adaptation measures are modelled in close exchange with city representatives. The traffic and transport sectors are simulated with a state-of-the-art multimodal tour-based transport model, which aims to depict passenger and freight transport activities and traffic flows for a typical workday for the status-quo, 2030, 2040 and 2050. To understand the microclimate as well as to identify heat stress hotspots of the city, the state-of-the-art model PALM-4U is used. A hot summer day with boundary conditions from a mesoscale climate model is applied to the status-quo city as well as a Tallinn of 2030, 2040 and 2050.To capture the impact of the transport scenarios to the microclimate simulationstransport infrastructure changes have been implemented as land-use changes within PALM-4U. Desealing of street lanes as well as parking lots and added street greenery within the future scenarios is applied in PALM-4U based on the modelled changes in transport infrastructure. Vice versa, the transport model is also impacted by the microclimate model, as street canyons with high heat stress during the daytime might be avoided by cyclists and pedestrians alike.This results effectively in a quantification of exposure for pedestrians and cyclists for each link, allowing to define additional weights for these passages within the transport model. These weights account for a disutility for pedestrians and cyclists within destination choice, mode choice and route assignment procedures. As the typical working day traffic is simulated for the entire year and the heat day simulation is only valid for some summer days, the weights derived from microclimate model are only applied as statistically appropriate for each future scenario.Many further interactions and linkages between the two modelling approaches are still omitted, however the possible enhancement of the transport model with heat stress information from the climate model lays an important foundation for further understanding the intersectoral impacts of climate adaptation measures and adds additional value in transit-orientated development.

Human-made climate change is increasingly impacting our living conditions, destroying infrastructure and threatening lives. The recent years and months have led to unprecedented events and record-breaking temperatures, with March being the tenth month in a row being the hottest so far (Copernicus). Not only rising temperatures but also altered precipitation patterns pose a challenge to the existing urban environments and thus to 2/3 of the human population (REF). Cities are especially affected since they consist of mainly sealed surfaces, which enhance climate change impacts such as increased heat or intensified precipitation events due to their different characteristics as natural areas (e.g. albedo, heat capacity, infiltration). Within KNOWING two climate impacts are investigated comprehensively – flooding (fluvial, pluvial) and its impact on infrastructure as well as heat and its impact on health. Therefore, two urban areas (Granollers, Spain and Tallinn, Estonia) are considered. To quantify possible interventions to adapt to current and future climate change impacts, two different models are applied: PALM-4U [1] and ICM-Infoworks. PALM-4U is an urban climate model used for quantifying the impact of greening on urban heat load. ICM-infoworks is used for assessing adaptation measures to lessen pluvial flooding. As both models rely on land use, the changes planned to adapt to heat (e.g. greening and unsealing) and those for reducing flooding (retention areas, unsealing) coincide. Within PALM-4U interventions such as increased tree cover, implementation of recreational parks, renaturalization of rivers and building-related measures (e.g. green roofs, retrofitting) are considered. All interventions leading to increased unsealing of areas and thus infiltration, also lessen the risk of flooding and can thus be implemented within ICM-Infoworks, quantifying the impact of the same interventions on flood risk. By assessing the impact of the same interventions within two models and concerning two different climate risks (heat and flooding) the double effectiveness is accounted for, thus allowing the holistic approach of adaptation to climate change.

Urban areas are severely affected by climate change, as the associated increase in temperature and precipitation intensity are further exacerbated by the prevailing morphology of densely built areas and the prevalence of sealed surfaces. Especially heat has been recognised as an increasing risk and therefore, appropriate adaptation measures such as nature-based solutions (NbS) have been studied extensively.Space is scarce and valuable in cities and the usability of urban spaces has gained a growing attention in the last years – not only in the sense of climate adaptation but also for climate protection, as the energy transition calls for the implementation of renewable energy sources, where public spaces offer great potential for PV-suitable areas. In addition, an increasing number of people living in cities demand more living space and put even more pressure on available public spaces.These three aspects form the basis of the presented study, where a highly frequented public space, the Volkertplatz in Vienna is chosen to be transformed into a climate-resilient, user-friendly and energy-generating space. To achieve this, the following steps are necessary: (i) analysis of the current and future local climate conditions, (ii) incorporating and understanding the needs of the local users, (iii) design of the BARTLETT (Blue-green energy-generating canopied seating and communication facility) and (iv) implementation of an appropriate process of involvement of the local authorities.The analyses show that the current design of the space prevents the infiltration of rainwater, intensifies the prevailing heat load in summer and mainly meets the needs of male users. Therefore, the transformed space needs to reduce the identified barriers in order to improve the quality of the Volkertplatz. A key element is the BARTLETT, a construction that improves the local microclimate, collects rainwater for irrigation of the plants and produces energy through the installed PV collectors. Furthermore, the design enhances the usability of the square by different groups, providing both open and more hidden spaces. To ensure the acceptance of local citizens, their needs have been identified, their behaviour observed, and their opinions incorporated through workshops. As important as the local support, is the timely involvement of relevant political stakeholders, which is ensured by the project partners and collected in a handbook to allow transferability to other public spaces.