The RAMSES Project has produced an immense and highly valuable collection of reports and resources on climate change adaptation and resilience in cities. The project has developed cutting-edge research on some of the most relevant topics for urban climate change adaptation. These include:
- Modeling climate projections and scenarios to understand future climate impacts and illustrate the effects of specific adaptation measures for cities;
- Understanding how to make architecture and infrastructure more resilient to climate change and how to assess the effects of improved architectural design on cities;
- Evaluating the costs of climate change and the benefits of different adaptation measures;
- Understanding the costs that climate change causes for health and how different adaptation measures can reduce climate impacts on public health;
- Conducting high-level vulnerability assessments in order to identify the climatic trends in European macro-regions and consequently the main risks to which cities in these regions are exposed;
- Conducting detailed vulnerability analyses in the cities of London, Antwerp and Bilbao at a high spatial resolution to draw lessons from these cities’ experiences;
- Understanding existing political frameworks and decision-making tools that support adaptation, and drawing lessons from those.
All the knowledge generated by the project is available on the project’s website but in order to present this to cities in a synthetised and practical fashion that can be used to actually make concrete decisions on climate change adaptation, Tecnalia and ICLEI have developed the current Transition Handbook and Training Package.
The Transition Handbook embeds the key RAMSES findings in a process management cycle, using widely known methodologies such as the Urban Adaptation Support Tool (http://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/knowledge/tools/urban-ast), which is the offical support tool of the Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy and synthetises the project results in a practical step-by-step fashion, presenting resources that cities can use to strenghten their knowledge of climate adaptation planning.
The Training Package complements the Transition Handbook by taking stock of existing toolkits to support adaptation management in cities and offers worksheets and exercises that cities can use to progress towards their adaptation goals. The worksheets are cross-referenced in the Transition Handbook so as to complement the information contained in it and to offer cities a clear path towards becoming more climate adaptive.
The Training Package is complemented by a slidedeck, available on the RAMSES website (www.ramses-cities.eu/toolbox), which summarises the most policy-relevant project findings to support cities in raising awareness on climate adaptation.
Videos from the RAMSES audio-visual guidance tool www.on-urban-resilience.eu , developed by Climate Media Factory are cross-referenced in the handbook and in the training package. They offer additional information on the different relevant sectors for adaptation planning by experts interviewed by the RAMSES Consortium in several occasions.
The Transition Handbook and Training Package are not intended to be stand-alone resources but instead aim to be used complementarily with other adaptation toolkits and with the http://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu platform, which represents the major European information hub on climate adaptation.