Water sensitive Cities: the Answer To CHallenges of extreme weather events (CATCH)

CATCH addresses the special needs of midsize cities to deal with climate change adaptation and the resulting extreme weather events. In the North Sea Region 80% of the population live in urban areas of which a majority lives in midsize cities. Due to their scale, limited resources and expertise and tight connection with the surrounding region, midsize cities face a number of specific challenges in dealing with climate change adaptation compared to large cities.

The CATCH project offers the partnership the unique possibility to join forces (on European and regional level) and creates a unique momentum to change local behaviour, create European awareness, and support North Sea Region midsize cities to take a significant step forward to become water sensitive cities.

The project aims at demonstrating that midsize cities in cooperation with their partners can accelerate the urgent process to become climate resilient. This results in inspiring examples in the 7 pilot cities, accompanied with a practical and usable set of generic tools for further uptake and dissemination in the North Sea Region.

Inspired by the water sensitive cities theory, the experienced partnership will develop a decision support tool and roadmap to support midsize cities in designing long term climate adaptation strategies. The developed tool is freely available and ready to be used by cities.

The overall objectives can be translated into five detailed project objectives:

1. Identifying state of the art and scoping needs of midsize cities
2. Design a tool for re-designing urban water management
3. Valuation of decision support tools and joint development and implementation of pilots
4. Building climate adaptation strategies
5. Uptake of project innovations and dissemination