CARDIMED: Advancing Climate Resilience in the Mediterranean

Last September, part of the BIOAZUL team travelled to Athens for the Kick-Off Meeting of CARDIMED, a groundbreaking Horizon Europe project focused on advancing climate resilience in the Mediterranean region.

CARDIMED, an acronym for Climate adaptation and resilience demonstrated In the Mediterranean region, aligns with the European Green Deal‘s core objective of the “twin digital and green transition.” Recognizing the challenges posed by the sensitive and biodiverse Mediterranean biogeographical region, the project aims to establish a nature-positive economy and a climate-resilient society through innovative green and digital solutions.

The project introduces a comprehensive framework to build climate resilience in the Mediterranean by unifying individual efforts across regions and communities. This will be achieved through the deployment of digital infrastructure, harmonizing data collection and evaluation processes, and providing open data to all stakeholders involved in Nature-based Solutions (NbS) across the region.

Key features of CARDIMED include smart digital tools for citizen participation and capacity building, a multi-stakeholder engagement strategy focused on knowledge translation, and the integration of the Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems (WEFE) Nexus approach for holistic modeling. These elements will contribute to addressing socio-ecological challenges, along with issues of valuation and low-investment rates in NbS.

The project will unfold across 9 demonstration sites, encompassing 10 regions, 20 locations, and 28 communities, involving 47 NbS directly linked to 83 interventions and supporting units. The culmination of these efforts will establish the CARDIMED Resilience Alliance, functioning as a pivotal vehicle for expanding the network through the upscaling of existing sites and the addition of new ones.

CARDIMED also includes 5 transferability cases, with an additional 10 to be defined during the project’s implementation phase.

As part of the project, BIOAZUL will lead the dissemination and communication in addition to the exploitation of the results. During the first meeting of the consortium, our colleague David Salaberri presented the bases of the dissemination strategy that will be followed for the project. Our CEO Antonia Lorenzo, for her part, shared some ideas about the strategy for exploiting CARDIMED’s results.