The City of Košice and the Technical University of Košice are the founding members of an innovative platform for cooperation in increasing climate resilience in the city of Košice. The Community Climate Resilience Mission is built from the beginning with the idea of long-term action beyond the period of individual climate-oriented projects and initiatives in the city.
Among the meetings aimed at engaging partners, the most significant was the kick-off meeting of the Climate Resilience Mission, which took place on 30.1.2024 at the Municipality of Košice. The emerging partnership is focused on developing cross-sectoral collaboration to increase the climate resilience of the territory and the city’s inhabitants.
In addition to the city and the university, the local mission in this initial phase also involves the Regional Development Agency of the Košice Self-Governing Region, the citizen initiatives East Coast and #ClimateNeedYou, the Institute for Sustainable and Circular Construction of the Faculty of Civil Engineering of the Technical University of Košice and the Institute of Geography of the Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice.
In the area of good governance, it is necessary to build on the adopted Adaptation Plan of the City of Košice to 2030 and to develop an Action Plan and an investment portfolio of climate-oriented activities as part of a joint approach. Planning and governance of the climate agenda will also be created in the context of the Joint Strategy of cooperating community missions in the Central Europe Region, where the challenges and impacts of climate change have many similarities.
The mapping of projects and initiatives already at this initial stage has provided a good overview of the strengths and the existing professional capacity of institutions in the territory, as well as the need to introduce new approaches, increase expertise and institutional capacity, and put in place improved system and data support for good climate decision-making and governance.
The mission will focus on climate resilience of Socio-Economic System and among the most important target group of the planned measures and activities will be preschool and primary school children.
The need for better monitoring and then decision-making on actions with the support of climate data is the motivation for the design of the pilot project. A better understanding of the needs of the target groups in the pilot phase will support the reasoning behind more broadly implemented and more investment-intensive measures and allow for sharing these outputs within transnational cooperation of similarly focused Community Climate Resilience Missions.