The mission of the EU R&I Task Force for Climate Neutral and Resilient Historic Urban Districts is to co-ordinate EU efforts to make historic and contemporary urban districts climate neutral and strengthen their resilience to the effects of climate change and natural hazards as well as the resilience of the communities depending on those areas.
The Task Force was established by the Horizon 2020 projects ARCH, HYPERION, and SHELTER in response to and support of the Horizon 2020 ‘Heritage Alive’ orientation to “[increase] resilience and sustainable reconstruction of historic areas to cope with climate change and hazard events,” following in the footsteps of earlier projects like STORM and HERACLES. Through its involvement in the ARCH project, ICLEI Europe is also a member of this Task Force.
Bringing together actors from practice, research, and policy, the task force aims to provide support to European authorities and decision makers for developing common evidence-based policies, strategies, and procedures. To achieve this goal, the task force focuses on three thematic areas:
- Developing resilience strategies for historic urban districts
- Developing harmonized approaches for assessing and monitoring risk and resilience
- Developing equitable solutions for and with communities
The technical core of the task force is made up of partners from European research projects in the fields of heritage management, climate change mitigation/adaptation, disaster risk management/resilience as well as urban planning and regeneration.
In addition, practitioners, decision makers and policy actors on European, national, and local level in those fields participate in the task force to discuss solutions offered by the technical partners and ensure their applicability.