The United Kingdom has historically experienced severe flood events, including that of summer 2007, which resulted in the loss of essential services including water and energy supply, as well as the destruction of infrastructures, with estimated costs exceeding £3.2 billion. About half a million people were immediately affected by this event, in terms of temporary absence of energy supply. In any of such flood event, once energy supply is impacted, so are other services as water distribution, transport, communication and health care.

Groundwork London – an environmental regeneration charity part of the Groundwork federation - in partnership with Hammersmith and Fulham Council, received LIFE+ funding for the Climate-Proofing Social Housing Landscapes project in 2013. The project, which came to an end in September 2016, has demonstrated an integrated approach to climate adaptation in urban areas by undertaking a package of affordable, light-engineering climate change adaptation measures based around the retrofitting of blue and green infrastructure.

In response to climate change, one of Hamburg’s objectives is to become greener, in the city and on the roofs. In this context, Hamburg is the first German city to have developed a comprehensive Green Roof Strategy. The goal is to plant a total of 100 hectares of green roof surface in the metropolitan area in the next decade. The Hamburg Ministry for Environment and Energy is providing financial support for the creation of green roofs to the sum of € 3 million until the end of 2019.

The former industrial area “Luciline” in Rouen, along the Seine river, has been re-designed profoundly into an ecodistrict (9 hectares in total), including both climate change adaptation and mitigation solutions. Sustainable living is the core principle of the neighbourhood re-design. Sustainability aspects are implemented by means of energy, water, biodiversity, transport and planning solutions that in most of the case play an important role for climate change adaption or mitigation.

The municipality of Ober-Grafendorf is located at an elevation of 280 m in a typical pre-Alpine landscape in the Mostviertel region in the western part of the Austrian province Lower Austria. With 4,612 inhabitants on a municipal territory of 24.6 km², Ober-Grafendorf has a population size only slightly above the statistical average of Austrian municipalities, and it is among the 98% of Austrian municipalities with less than 20.000 inhabitants.

In Germany, for a long time a single fee for both rainwater and wastewater was levied in all communities. After some German court decisions the fee for rainwater was separated from wastewater one and is now based on the extension of impervious property surface (m²), which directs water into the public sewage system. Collecting rainwater on private property with e.g. rain barrel or infiltration system (as for example green space) is then likely to reduce sewage costs due to lower loads to be treated by the treatment plant.

Körös-Maros National Park, SE-Hungary, was created in 1997 for the protection of birds. Located in the region consisting of the meandering branches of river Körös and on the Dévaványai, it has a variety of habitats including steppes, remnants of wooded grasslands and marshlands as well as meadows and groves of extraordinary value. The impacts of climate change to these habitats can be great and varied, but also can exasperate the impacts caused by other pressures.

Vrijburcht is a multipurpose living-and-working complex in Amsterdam. It offers many shared social amenities for both the residents and the people from the neighbourhood. The heart of the complex is the courtyard garden with trees, a vegetable garden, lawns, flowers, benches and a greenhouse. The garden provides various solutions to the expected impact of climate change; it offers residents a cool environment during warmer summers; rain water is stored in underground tanks for irrigation in dry periods; the unsealed area permits maximum rainwater permeability.

Bilbao’s ‘Zorrotzaurre’ district is currently a degraded, flood-prone industrial peninsula. With increasing extreme precipitation predicted across the Basque country in the future due to climate change and a need for new housing to accommodate citizens of Bilbao, a major urban regeneration project is currently underway to redevelop Zorrotzaurre district into a new flood-proof residential quarter.

In response to flooding causing damage in Smolyan’s Ustovo neighbourhood in 2005, the city implemented a number of flood protection measures that presumably have paid off already during the wet year of 2014. Under the project, river banks were widened, existing protection walls were reinforced and new walls constructed. The cost of about 480,000 EUR was mainly derived from funding by the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).