Horizon 2020 Project

Sligo County Council to take part in €10M Horizon 2020 project to increase climate resilience in European coastal cities

Sligo County Council has announced it is taking part in a newly launched €10 million euro Horizon 2020 project that aims to increase climate resilience in European coastal cities. 

The four year project, SCORE (Smart Control of the Climate Resilience in European Coastal Cities), outlines a comprehensive strategy, developed via a network of 10 coastal city ‘living labs’, to rapidly, equitably and sustainably enhance coastal city climate resilience though an Ecosystem-Based Approach (EBA) supported by sophisticated digital technologies.

The intensification of extreme weather events, coastal erosion and sea-level rise are major challenges to be urgently addressed by European coastal cities.  Deaths caused by extreme weather in Europe could rise from 3,000 a year between 1981 and 2010 to 152,000 between 2071 and 2100 if mitigation pathways are not enacted to increase the resilience of European cities and settlements, based on a study in The Lancet Planetary Health journal.

To tackle this challenge, Dr Salem Gharbia from the Institute of Technology Sligo (Ireland), will lead a consortium of international scientific institutions, cities, and SMEs in a new €10m Horizon 2020-funded research project to increase climate resilience in European coastal cities.

The SCORE interdisciplinary team consists of 28 world-leading organisations from academia, local authorities, RPOs, and SMEs encompassing a wide range of skills including environmental science and policy, climate modelling, citizen and social science, data management, coastal management and engineering, security and technological aspects of smart sensing research.

The project will involve citizen science in providing prototype coastal city early-warning systems and will enable smart, instant monitoring and control of climate resilience in European coastal cities through open, accessible spatial 'digital twin' tools.

Along with Sligo the project seeks to advance the control of climate resilience in cities in Ireland, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Slovenia, Poland and Turkey.

After a recent “Kick-Off” meeting with academics from across Europe, Pete Murtagh, Climate Action officer with Sligo County Council said:

“We are really happy to be working on this project with IT Sligo, as well as the other institutes involved in the SCORE project. It is a great example of collaboration between educational institutes and Local Authorities across Europe with the shared goal being to make all of our communities better prepared and more resilient to the impacts of climate change. The fundamentally important aspect of including citizens in preparing for the challenges of a changing climate is assured by utilizing the concept of citizen science and setting up our Coastal Community Living Laboratory here in Sligo.”

SCORE will establish an integrated coastal zone management framework for strengthening the Ecosystem-Based solutions and smart coastal city policies, creating European leadership in coastal city climate change adaptation in line with The Paris Agreement.