Southwest Finland’s innovative climate adaptation planning for water resilience

The RESIST project is based on cross-sector collaboration, involving a public–academia consortium, including municipalities, regional council, universities and research institutes, alongside landowners, citizens and policymakers. To replicate this model, regions should prioritise involving local governments for planning, academic partners for scientific rigor, landowners/farmers or other local stakeholders for implementation and community groups for social acceptance, ensuring a holistic, catchment-level approach to climate-resilient water management. 

The RESIST project offers a replicable public–academia collaboration model that bridges research, planning and implementation, ensuring seamless scaling up of climate adaptation efforts. It provides research-based evidence on the performance and benefits of NbS, facilitating wider adoption across regions. Central to its scalability is a catchment-level framework, applicable to storm water and agricultural and forestry water management, that integrates biodiversity considerations. Complementing this are transferable tools and digital models, that are successfully being replicated in Eastern Macedonia and Thrace, Greece and Normandy, France.