At the Tech Impact Festival on 25 and 26 March 2026 at RWTH Aachen University, around 1,500 participants from academia, industry and start-ups discussed how to transfer innovations into practice. Under the guiding theme “Bridging the Innovation Gap”, the focus was on application-oriented solutions to current challenges. FiW contributed to the session “Water and climate adaptation in the built and lived environment” and shared insights from water management research. A key question was how municipalities can assess and prioritise climate adaptation measures. We were pleased to actively participate in the event and contribute our work to the professional exchange.
As part of the session, Nina Ott, M. Sc., gave the presentation “Prioritise before it becomes expensive: data-driven climate adaptation in municipalities”. The focus was on how municipalities can systematically evaluate and prioritise climate adaptation measures.
The project R2K-Klim was presented as a best-practice example. The aim of the project was to support municipalities in the structured planning of climate adaptation measures. The City of Duisburg served as a practice partner, where the developed approaches were applied in a pilot case.
The project developed methods to make climate-related risks, affected areas and the impacts of measures comparable. These are based on a structured assessment of different courses of action using defined indicators.
A key outcome is the decision support tool “Climate Adaptation of Urban Systems (KLAUS)”. The tool visualises climate impacts such as flooding, heavy rainfall and heat. This information can be integrated into planning processes, for example in construction projects or the planning of blue-green infrastructure. At the same time, the visualisation supports communication with political decision-makers and the public.
From 2027 onwards, selected methods are planned to be transferred to additional regions, including the Ruhr area and the Aachen city region. The approaches developed in the R2K-Klim project help to structure and make decision-making processes in municipalities comparable. The results can be integrated into existing planning instruments such as climate adaptation strategies. This enables early prioritisation of measures and helps reduce long-term follow-up costs caused by climate impacts.
The tool is available here
