Integrating climate adaptation and resilience into different sectors and local policies

Key Learnings

• Integrated approach to resilience: It is important to establish a common understanding of resilience and adaptation as cross-cutting topics within the city administration. Aligning objectives and agendas among departments is key to increase the coherence of policies and actions.
• Institutional collaboration: Collaboration with both internal and external partners (such as civil protection for climate risk) maximizes impact and influences decision-making.
• Involvement in research & innovation projects: Participating in research and innovation projects is pivotal to promoting data collection, tools, and solution development. By leveraging knowledge, capacities and resources, local authorities can update and inform strategic documents, guidelines, and local decision-making processes.
• Synergies between mitigation and adaptation: Climate mitigation and adaptation cannot be performed in an isolated manner. Nature-based solutions and greening interventions support both climate neutrality targets and improve the city’s adaptive capacity.

Summary

Recognizing the threats that climate change poses, the city of Milan and its Urban Resilience Department developed an integrated approach to adapt to climate change. This approach consists of collaborating departments and addressing climate adaptation and mitigation together. Additionally, the participation of the Urban Resilience Department in EU-funded research and innovation projects has greatly supported the city of Milan in its efforts to combat climate change (e.g. by collecting and analyzing data to incorporate climate change adaptation within local plans and policies). The core measures that work for Milan include de-sealing and re-naturalizing the city.

Contact

Dr. Ilaria Giuliani (Chief Resilience Officer): Ilaria [dot] giulianicomune [dot] milano [dot] it (Ilaria[dot]giuliani[at]comune[dot]milano[dot]it)