Supporting and Developing WIdening Strategies to tackle Hydroclimatic Extreme Events: impacts and Sustainable solutions for cultural heritage

The purpose of the proposal put together by the Climate JPI and the Water JPI is to enable collaboration between national research and innovation funding members to address together the protection of cultural heritage in Europe and beyond.

With this purpose, both JPIs will support the implementation of multi-annual joint activities that will focus on the better understanding of, and the identification of best available adaptation solutions in response to hydroclimatic extreme events.

The Consortium established by both JPIs gathers today 16 organisations including programme owners (funding agencies from Belgium, France, Georgia, Italy, Malta, UK, Kenya, Portugal and Romania), research performing organisations/ academia, foundations and private companies.

The following operational objectives have been laid out by the Consortium: - Enhance cross-sector collaborations and strategic coordination between water, climate and cultural heritage. - Launch and monitor joint activities to measure progress towards widening. - Address potential barriers for collaboration. - Evaluate the impacts of those joint activities on widening policies as well as EU and international policy frameworks, notably the EU Green Deal and the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). - Implement joint activities enabling the market, regulatory and societal uptake of results.

The project will be structured around 6 work packages (WP) looking at the coordination of activities (WP1), the identification of relevant gaps in the fields of cultural heritage, water and climate (WP2), the launch of joint activities, the TAP instrument (Thematic Annual Programming; WP3), communication and dissemination of project results (WP4), the analysis of impacts of proposed actions on EU widening strategies (WP5), and the implementation of specific tools to enable the social, regulatory and market uptake of proposed innovations stemming from joint activities (WP6).