With climate change accelerating, climate adaptation is becoming an increasingly important topic for the world’s cities, which continue to grow and contribute immensely to global emissions. While transport-related public space in cities is too often neither sustainable nor effective, Nordic cities have pioneered world-leading solutions for transforming public space which – apart from helping reduce transport emissions, improve air quality and create more inclusive spaces – have also brought clear benefits in terms of climate adaptation.

The Urban Climate Adaptation in the Nordics (UCAN) project, co-funded by the Nordic Council of Ministers and run by EIT Urban Mobility – an initiative of the European Institute of Innovation and Technology (EIT), a body of the EU – will showcase examples of public-space and street transformation projects in Nordic cities that have also contributed to climate adaptation.

The project will bring practitioners and policymakers from the region together in sharing their insights and best practices, as well as include Nordic youth voices via a creative competition in which young people can express their visions for transformed streets. The Nordic city solutions and youth visions will then be published as an inspirational catalogue that will provide practitioners and policymakers with information on the environmental, economic and social impacts of such projects, and bring Nordic solutions to the rest of Europe.

This project has been funded by the Nordic Working Group for Climate and Air (NKL) under the auspices of the Nordic Council of Ministers. The Nordic Vision is to become the most sustainable and integrated region in the world by 2030. The co-operation with the Nordic Council of Ministers must support this purpose. This project supports the vision on green transition and Nordic solutions within the areas of climate neutrality and climate adaptation.