The Metropolitan Area of Rome has been busy! It has published a pricing list for sustainable construction materials, based on analysis of availability, and introduced a new GPP monitoring system, the first of its kind in Italy.

Price list for green public works

In Italy public works are estimated on the basis of regional price lists. The Metropolitan City of Rome, in response to the challenges of lack of information on local market readiness and costs when introducing environmental criteria into public works tenders, carried out a detailed analysis on the availability of low environmental impact construction materials at national and regional level.

The Metropolitan City approved a new price list based on the results of this analysis to be adopted as reference for public works. The price list was published online, on the institutional web site, and disseminated trough workshops both at internal and local level.

For information, please visit the Metropolitan Area of Rome website.

A new GPP monitoring system

The GPP Action Plan of the Province of Rome was approved in 2009. After the first period of implementation, the Action Plan was updated in 2014 and extended to new product categories. GPP progress and results were monitored every two years (2009/2010, 2011/2012, 2013/2014). In 2016, the Metropolitan City of Rome has introduced a new GPP monitoring system that will allow for a punctual assessment on the achievement of GPP objectives and for the collection of basic info for monitoring CO2 savings also in the future, after the project end.

The Metropolitan City of Rome is the first public authority in Italy to introduce this innovative monitoring system which is linked to the public procurement electronic information system. It will allow to elaborate and publish data according to different criteria such as date, product categories, purchasing departments and volume of the contracts.

The Smart Mature Resilience (SMR) project launched the pilot implementation of its tools in partner city Donostia/San Sebastián, Basque Country (Spain) on 13 April 2016 at a kick-off workshop in the project host institution of Tecnun, University of Navarra. According to Diario de Noticias de Gipuzkoa, Mayor of San Sebastián Eneko Goia opened the meeting, noting that San Sebastián faces “two risks associated with the global phenomenon of climate change that test the resilience of the city itself: these are the sea and the river.”

He further noted the importance of the event in Tecnun, as it marks the launch of the testing phase of the SMR project's pilot tools, which aim to enhance cities’ capacity to resist, absorb and recover from the hazardous effects of climate change. SMR researchers work with the project partner cities of San Sebastián, Glasgow (UK) and Kristiansand (Norway) to develop tools to assess and develop cities’ resilience. Together, they develop and pilot tools in these three core cities. The tools are then reviewed and evaluated by researchers and by a group of four other partner cities. It is foreseen that they will be spread to cities in Europe and beyond.

The testing process was launched in February 2016 in Kristiansand with a workshop focusing on water, and continued in San Sebastián, where the main focus of the workshop was communication flows in the energy and telecommunication security sector, particularly in emergency situations. The next launch of tools testing will take place in Glasgow. The other four project cities – Bristol (UK), Vejle (Denmark), Rome (Italy) and Riga (Latvia) – will closely observe the testing process and learn alongside the pilot cities.

For more information, visit smr-project.eu.

The City of Rome (Italy) has published its preliminary resilience evaluation, which takes stock of the Italian capital’s progress in ensuring resilience to climate change and looks at areas to focus on in the future. The report is based on the City Resilience Framework provided by 100 Resilient Cities. The preliminary evaluation has been carried out by the Resilience Work-Group of Rome, who solicited feedback from stakeholders and citizens through public events and questionnaires.

The report will feed into the development of the “Resilience Rome scenario”, the city’s official resilience strategy, which is due to be published in December 2016. The city has used the opportunity of the strategy redevelopment to promote a remapping of the city’s issues and policies towards resilience.

The document concludes with an outline of the city’s strengths and vulnerabilities. Based on the analysis of the results obtained during the evaluation process, five priority areas have been indentified – territory and connections; people and capacity; resources and human metabolism; systems, nets and heritage; and governance, participation and civic culture.

For more information, visit the project website [in Italian].

Smart Mature Resilience launched the pilot implementation of its tools in partner city of Donostia/San Sebastián on Wednesday 13 April at a kick-off workshop in the host institution of Tecnun.

Following introductions by the city on why resilience is a priority for Donostia and what the city plans to achieve through participation in the SMR project, the group shared the latest updates on the five tools that are to make up the Resilience Management Guideline: the Resilience Maturity Model, the Systemic Risk Assessment Questionnaire, the Portfolio of Resilience Building Policies, the System Dynamics Model and the Resilience Engagement and Communication Tool. Starting from the kick-off meetings in the three partner cities, these tools will be evaluated according to observation in a collaborative process of co-creation between project researchers and cities.

At the workshop on 13 April 2016, the scientific partners and partner cities got straight down to the business of stakeholder mapping: first, identifying and understanding which key actors and parties are most relevant to day-to-day operations in the energy and telecommunication security sector, before defining and analysing how these dynamics and relationships work in the case of an emergency.

Donostia/San Sebastián and SMR’s research partners are now ready to begin work on the pilot tools testing phase of the project. To read more about Donostia/San Sebastián as an SMR partner city, please click here.

Project coordinator Professor José María Sarriegi hosted two presentations on the Smart Mature Resilience Project in March 2016, providing insights into the projects progress to participants of the Internal Seminars program of the Management and Marketing Department of the University Pablo de Olavide (UPO) and Industrial Management Engineering students of the University of Navarra (TECNUN).

The seminars addressed the issue of how all cities are vulnerable to crisis, from small incidents, such as water and electricity shortages, to more severe crises such as floods or earthquakes that generate high economic impacts and loss of life. The consequences of these crises depend on the preparation and the response level of the cities to address these crises.