Be Ready Project: resilience, preparedness and mitigation strategies for urban heat islands

Recent unprecedented heat waves demonstrate the acute need to strengthen society's preparedness and adaptive capacity to climate change impacts and to promote resilience at the city level.

The aim of the project is to support partner cities in increasing their resilience to the negative impacts of heat islands. In this context, effective measures will be developed, tested and implemented to help tackle heat islands.

The project will enable targeted measures to address urban heat islands in critical urban areas. Specific solutions to support green, blue or white measures will be tested in pilot projects. Green measures are based on vegetation, white measures address heat islands through innovative surfaces and materials and blue measures focus on new uses of water resources. A total of 12 cities from all countries in the Danube region will be involved in the pilot testing. Within the Czech Republic, the municipality of Ratiboř will be the first. The main outputs of the project include jointly developed and implemented methodologies and toolkits for urban heat island risk assessment, data analysis and modelling at city level. 

Urban heat islands have a negative impact on the people who live in them. Higher temperatures affect not only the physical and mental well-being of city residents, but also the quality of the environment, not to mention the higher costs of air conditioning buildings. The expected benefit of the proposed solutions is to reduce the temperature in cities by up to 1 degree Celsius and thus mitigate the above mentioned negative impacts.

The project started on the first of January 2024.

This project is co-financed by the European Union under the Interreg Danube Region Programme.