The AER Secretariat is happy to share with its member regions and partners a project opportunity developed by its partner network ALDA – The European Association of Local Democracy with the leadership of the Municipality of Santorso (in Vicenza province – Italy).

The project “Rural and Urban Lands of NOrth VIcenza Province under a Sustainable WATER management” will be submitted within the Life Programme and it relates with climate adaptation. Its main objective is to demonstrate that local communities could make the difference in order to reduce the impact of floods.

More specifically, the project is aimed to:

1. demonstrate that small diffused works and implementation of best practices can guarantee hydraulic safety and face climate change consequences effectively;
2. establish a local administrative, financial, and technical context that is favorable to develop initiatives for water retention;
3. promote a participative approach in the setup of strategies and measures to implement local initiatives for water retention.

The project is innovative for the type of approach adopted to tackle the flood issue. In fact, instead of developing big structural interventions (e.g. banks, detention basins) the project proposes a set of less expensive works that can be easier to replicate and adopt by municipalities, farmers or citizens in different contexts. Some demonstrative interventions will be realised during the project such as green roofs, sustainable drainage system SuDs, water basins in agricultural areas, drainage networks and more, etc.

ALDA is now searching for local entities (public bodies or similar) in Europe that are interested to know the results of the project in order to realise and implement similar actions/works.

The dissemination of the results will foresee the following activities:

1. a training week in Italy on project themes addressed to technicians and/or administrators;
2. webinars on specific topics (for example, green roofs, sustainable drainage system SuDs, water basins in agricultural areas…);
3. workshops in different communities (our technical experts will showcase the interventions realised in Italy in order to “invite/encourage” other stakeholders to replicate them).

The supporting local entities will benefit of all the above-mentioned actions, whose costs will be entirely covered by the project.

 If you are interest to be part of it get it touch with us by 10th July! We will be happy to inform you about next steps to support this interesting project!