CLIMABOROUGH is a project, co-funded by the European Union and CINEA, with the ambition to bridge the gap between design and implementation of urban innovations, particularly in the face of climatic change and its consequential needs for adaptation and mitigation.

CLIMABOROUGH is one of the 3 projects chosen by CINEA to work on Urban Planning and Design in the framework of the ‘100 Climate Neutral and Smart Cities‘ Mission.

The project, coordinated by ANCI Toscana and counting on 27 other partners, works to fight the many bottlenecks in the transition from prototyping to testing of innovation and from successful testing to market deployment.

In CLIMABOROUGH, we define and promise to test three innovative concepts:

1. The “Climate Sandbox”, facilitating under a legal and/or administrative point of view, the diffusion of technologically and socially innovative solutions, whenever they can document a strong capacity of carbon dioxide recapturing or climate change adaptation, much in the same way as in the past, urban transformation initiatives were facilitated by the regulator, whenever they promised to bring high socio-economic benefits;
2. The “ClimHub”, which is more than a Lighthouse pilot, in the sense that it promotes and actively works for a faster and more widespread diffusion of sustainable innovations against the climatic threats, leveraging on the evidence-based learning generated by co-creation dynamics seeing startup companies and solution providers involved on a peer basis with local public sector authorities in innovative replication methods;
3. The “Climate Service”, consisting in the transformation of climate-related data – together with other relevant information – into customised products such as projections, forecasts, information, trends, economic analyses, assessments,counselling on best practices, development and evaluation of solutions and any other service in relation to climate that may be of use for the society at large.

These three concepts will be tested within a significant number of European cities, characterised by a wide variety in size, interests and geographical location as described in the methodology, namely 8 leaders and 4 follower cities (+2 associates acting as observers).