City combats climate change - Integrated strategies for Essen | Umweltbundesamt

Background and Goals

With more than 570,000 inhabitants, Essen is the largest city in the Urban Climate model project. Since the 1960s, the Ruhr conurbation has recorded a negative population trend, which forecasts suggest will continue in the coming years.

As a densely populated major city, which is also located in the Ruhrgebiet conurbation, Essen is extremely susceptible to climate effects. There is primarily an increasing risk from extreme events. For example, in the densely built-up areas of the city centre and the surrounding residential areas, urban heat islands form and cause heat stress in the summer.

The city of Essen set up an integrated energy and climate concept (IEKK) back in 2009. It comprises 160 ongoing and planned measures over a period of five years, most of which are aimed at climate protection. As part of the model project, existing activities are to be supported and, in particular, supplemented with exemplary adaptation strategies and measures in various fields of action in urban development.

Objectives: With the slogan "City combats climate change", the objective is to develop an integrated concept for climate adapted urban development measures in the conurbation. This will involve developing innovative strategies to strengthen local authority capability to act and use the planning instruments, and putting in place a broad participation process.

The objectives are:

•  Identification, assessment, definition and evaluation of the foreseeable impacts of climate change in the fields of action relevant to Essen,
•  Definition of adaptation requirements at an overall city level (including consideration of neighbouring cities) and in respect of selected districts,
•  Setting up an integrated programme of measures for dealing with climate change,
•  Development of local adaptation strategies to combat climate change locally, and
•  Use of scenarios in model districts to highlight the possible future building structure and building features, open space design, design of public spaces, town planning and urban planning.

Four different research workshops are scheduled to pool available knowledge, experience and new research results. Specialist working groups will collate and disseminate existing knowledge, identify foreseeable risks of climate change, and draw up the elements of a programme of measures. The detail of the project came from two different model districts, for which realistic visionary future trends were outlined using scenarios and the resulting adaptation requirements identified.

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