03/06/2026 | News, Blogs
In our fourth interview, our project partner Carmela Apreda from the CMCC Foundation highlights the latest MULTICLIMACT catalogue of adaptation policies and guidelines for a climate-proof built environment. Its main purpose is to help decision-makers better understand existing policy frameworks and strengthen climate adaptation planning across different levels of governance.
What first drew you—personally and professionally—to focus on adaptation policies and measures for making the built environment climate-proof?
Carmela Apreda (CMCC):
From the start of my work at CMCC, I was fascinated by how climate change impacts manifests differently across scales, from the street corner to the regional network of infrastructure. Personally, I’ve always been drawn to translating scientific insights into concrete solutions that improve people’s daily lives. Professionally, this led me to focus on adaptation policies and measures because the built environment is where theory meets reality: a city or building can be designed to withstand impacts from heatwaves, floods, or droughts, but only if the right policies and interventions guide its development. What excites me most is seeing a measure move from a conceptual framework to something tangible that protects communities and enhances resilience.
Many cities understand high-level adaptation frameworks, but struggle to translate them into locally actionable plans. Where do you see the biggest “translation gap” in practice, and how does D1 help close it?
Carmela Apreda (CMCC):
The biggest gap I see is between abstract frameworks and the messy realities of local contexts. Cities often have strategies, but they struggle to turn them into concrete interventions—what should be done where, by whom, and with what resources. D2.1 helps close this gap by providing a structured methodology and a digital catalogue that translates high-level policy into context-specific measures. It’s not just a list, it’s an evaluative tool that helps decision-makers consider which measures fit their local scale, hazards, and governance structures, supporting actionable plans rather than theoretical ones.
When you reviewed policies and measures across scales (European, national, local), what patterns surprised you most—and what do you wish decision-makers understood better as a result?
Carmela Apreda (CMCC):
We conducted a total of four co-development workshops where we progressed from foundational stakeholder alignment to operational usability testing. Each workshop targeted a distinct phase of development, ensuring iterative refinement based on targeted feedback.
Our stakeholder mapping workshop established the user base by identifying key stakeholder groups, their roles, and operational contexts, ensuring subsequent design phases accounted for diverse needs. After, the user experience and interface design workshop evaluated usability and interface clarity, with participants assessing user flow, terminology, and design coherence. Feedback led to refinements like adjusting professional terminology to better align with user expectations. During the third workshop we tested the clarity and relevance of tool outputs across different user profiles. Participants highlighted the need for clearer explanations and contextual support, particularly for users less familiar with resilience metrics or economic loss calculations. Finally, we shifted focus to end-to-end functionality testing, revealing operational friction points in scenario management while investigating the user journey and testing the tool’s usability. While users reported only 63% clarity rating for editing/deleting scenarios and 50% clarity rating for calculation steps , this workshop underscored the need for enhanced onboarding, workflow transparency, and contextual guidance to support independent use.
D2.1 looks at adaptation through multiple resilience dimensions (including physical, health and well-being, technical, economic, environmental, organisational). Can you share an example of how this multi-dimensional lens changes priorities compared to a purely technical perspective?
Carmela Apreda (CMCC):
A good example is how we approach urban heat. From a purely technical perspective, the priority might be to reduce surface or indoor temperatures as efficiently as possible, for instance, by installing reflective materials or optimizing building insulation. When we apply a multi-dimensional resilience lens, the priorities shift quite significantly. We start asking additional questions: “Who benefits from this measure?”, “Does it improve outdoor comfort and public health, especially for vulnerable groups?“, “Is it economically feasible for large-scale implementation and maintenance?“, “Does it require specific governance or coordination mechanisms?”. In practice, this often leads to different choices. For example, instead of focusing only on technical solutions at the building level, cities might prioritize integrated solutions such as urban greening, shading in public spaces, or nature-based interventions. These may be slightly less optimal from a strictly technical efficiency standpoint, but they deliver broader co-benefits, improving well-being, enhancing biodiversity, supporting social inclusion, and sometimes even reducing long-term costs. This multi-dimensional perspective helps avoid solutions that are technically effective but limited in their real-world impact, and instead promotes measures that are more balanced, inclusive, and sustainable over time.
If you had to give a city team three practical entry points into the catalogue—three ways to start using it tomorrow—what would they be and for which typical use cases?
Carmela Apreda (CMCC):
The following entry points allow city teams to move from problem identification to concrete, context-sensitive solutions without having to start from scratch:
Thank you for the interview!
Find more details about the Guideline on adaption policies & measures & have a look at our other project results.
This interview was conducted by Lucia Hörner, Project Manager at Steinbeis Europa Zentrum, and Elina Schock, Project Consultant at Steinbeis Europa Zentrum. Steinbeis Europa Zentrum is responsible for dissemination, communication and exploitation activities in MULTICLIMACT.
Picture copyright: RINA-C, MULTICLIMACT project coordinator
About MULTICLIMACT:
MULTICLIMACT is an EU-funded project aimed at safeguarding Europe’s built environment against the increasing threats of natural and climatic hazards. By uniting 25 leading European organisations, MULTICLIMACT aims to enhance resilience, sustainability, and safety for communities across the continent. Through innovative strategies, including a toolkit of 20 reliable methods and digital solutions, the project targets the urgent need for adaptive measures against floods, earthquakes, extreme weather conditions and heatwaves. Tested across four pilot sites with diverse climatic conditions, MULTICLIMACT embodies a shared vision for a safer, more resilient future, focusing on actions to reduce the impact of climate change on the built environment. For more information, please visit www.multiclimact.eu.
MULTICLIMACT is a Horizon Europe project supported by the European Commission under grant agreement No 101123538. Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
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