Management of urban water resources in Central Europe facing climate change

Climate changes (CC) pose a risk to water resources availability in many CE countries. The regions need to increase resilience to extreme weather events as urban droughts and floods as well as depletion of urban groundwater (GW) resources. Both falling groundwater levels in long term and the excessive amounts of water in short period become urgent risks to be tackled by adequate water management practises. The project aims to enhance the capacity of regions in CE for climate change resilience in the aspect of urban water resources management by joint development of climate-adaptation solutions. The project solutions to be adopted by public administrations and water management bodies will result in a behavioural change in water management and spatial planning practices to increase the resilience to climate change in regions. Key innovation is provided through the integral consideration of water management issues being part of regional and city related wider climate change adaptation concepts and the comprehensive water management approach. The cooperation network of 11 organisations will jointly develop and implement 6 pilot actions, 8 solutions, 6 action plans and a managament strategy to the benefit of cities, regions and related water management and water supply organisations. All solutions will have innovative character and have not been used so far in the involved regions. The transnational cooperation of the partners from various regions is needed to gather exemplification of key aspects to be tackled and related regional expertise. Working at transnational level will increase the capacity and enhance the knowledge transfer to reduce barriers to effective climate change adaptation of regions. We expect that the network and best practise demonstrated will increase awareness of local and regional policy makers encouraging further implementation of jointly developed strategy, action plans and solutions to climate change adaptation in the context of urban water management.