CARDIMED: Climate adaptation and resilience demonstrated In the Mediterranean region

“Twin digital and green transition” is at the heart of the European Green Deal objectives, and a key pathway towards a climate resilient future. However, in the sensitive, biodiverse and culturally diverse climate hotspot of the Mediterranean (MED) biogeographical region, the establishment of a nature-positive economy and a climate-resilient society based on green and digital innovation is a challenge.  

CARDIMED will introduce a framework to build Climate Resilience in the Mediterranean biogeographical region, efficiently unifying individual efforts of regions and communities across different countries and continents. This will be achieved by deploying the digital infrastructure to harmonise the data collection and evaluation processes, providing open data to all the actors involved in the Nature-based Solutions (NbS) value chain and integrating crucial functions for Climate Resilience. 

Among these functions, smart digital tools for citizen participation and capacity building will supplement an ambitious multi-stakeholder engagement strategy, focused on knowledge translation and impact pathways. Furthermore, holistic modelling tools introducing the Water-Energy-Food-Ecosystems (WEFE) Nexus approach will provide comprehensive knowledge on the complex NbS interfaces, that will decisively contribute to addressing socio-ecological challenges, along with issues of valuation and low-investment rate in NbS. 

These actions will be implemented across 9 demonstration sites, composed of 10 regions, 20 locations and 28 communities and comprising 47 NbS that directly relate to 83 interventions and supporting units that tackle climate change and circularity challenges. The consolidation of the demonstrating regions and communities will establish the CARDIMED Resilience Alliance, that will function as the vehicle for expanding the network via upscaling the existing sites and adding new ones. 

The project includes 5 transferability cases, as well as an additional 10 that will be defined during the implementation.