Productive Dialogue on City Deal for Climate Adaptation
During the City Deal meeting on February 13th, participants in the City Deal Climate Adaptation had a productive dialogue with a number of key players in the real estate sector and infrastructure & energy networks. Both municipalities and other sectors perform stress tests for climate adaptation, but they do not usually speak to each other. They face the same risks of infrastructure failure, damages and health issues due to increased flooding, heat and drought in urban and rural areas. The participants explored solutions and identified a number of actions around various bottlenecks at the local and national level. NextGreen facilitated this dialogue together with the coordinators of the City Deal.
The short informative pitches given by representatives of infrastructure organizations ProRail, Rijkswaterstaat, TenneT and real estate stakeholders MVGM Vastgoedbeheer, GroeneHuisvesters and the Dutch Association of Insurers initiated further brainstorming and dialogue during the meeting.
In this setting, the discussion on urban climate risks (or ‘risk dialogues’) were clearly broadened beyond the role that municipalities play in this. Conversely, managers of vital infrastructure also need coordination with municipalities and provinces.
Both for the themes ‘Property & insurability’ and ‘Infrastructure & networks’ the meeting started with an overview of the challenges, bottlenecks and opportunities. Eight topics were then explored by small subgroups, which identified the parties involved, possible solutions, concrete actions and options for cooperation. Creating a platform in which stress test methods and results can be shared emerged as one of the solutions.
The City Deal for Climate Adaptation website (in Dutch) contains a summary of the eight topics, as well as a link to this afternoon’s presentations.