Together with the Estonian Environmental Research Centre, SEI Tallinn will support Pärnu City and County in developing innovative solutions. Together they will install weather sensors in Pärnu City to measure the temperature, relative humidity and precipitation all over the city and to map out Pärnu’s heat islands.

This mapping is very important for setting a baseline and monitoring change, said SEI Tallinn’s expert Blaine Lowry. “The weather sensor network will help Pärnu make informed urban planning decisions now and in the future, with the aim of minimizing the impact of urban heat on citizens and infrastructure,” said Lowry. Furthermore, the project will research Pärnu rivers and landslide risk, to prevent their occurrence and guide future planning decisions.

“In a time of fast environmental changes, it is not reasonable to wait for society and the economy to gradually adapt to the changes by themselves,” said Anette Iital, project manager at the Estonian Environmental Research Centre. She noted that Estonia has been including climate adaptation in national strategies and agendas. “Human-caused climate change, including more frequent and extreme weather events, inflicts increasing harm on nature and people. In the past several years, Estonia has put more effort into raising climate awareness among institutions and citizens. The issue is of national importance.”

In addition to Pärnu City, all other Pärnu County municipalities will participate in the project. The head of Pärnu County’s Union of Municipalities, Erik Reinhold, sees municipalities as the key drivers of climate policy in the county. The Union led the preparation of Pärnu County’s climate agenda for 2030. The plan includes municipalities’ actions for adaptation, including exchanging knowledge and cooperating with other regions and research centres in Estonia and abroad.

About the project

The Regions4Climate project brings together 44 partners from 12 different European regions to demonstrate innovations that enhance societal resilience to the impacts of climate change. The project is coordinated by VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland.

Project partners will collaboratively develop and implement novel social, technological, digital, business, governance and environmental solutions. This effort will reinforce adaptive capacity and minimize vulnerability to climate impacts in line with the Paris Agreement and the EU Green Deal.

The five-year project started in January 2023. It received a grant of over 24.5 million euros from the European Commission under the Horizon Europe research and innovation programme addressing “Large scale demonstrators of climate resilience creating cross-border value” (HORIZON-MISS-2021-CLIMA-02-04).

The 12 partner regions are the Basque country (Spain), South Aquitaine (France), the Azores (Portugal), Toscana (Italy), Køge Bay (Denmark), Burgas (Bulgaria), Helsinki-Uusimaa (Finland), Pärnumaa (Estonia), eastern Crete (Greece), Castilla y León (Spain), the Nordic Archipelago (Finland, Åland and Sweden), and Troodos (Cyprus).  At least 13.8 million people are expected to directly benefit from the outcomes of the project, with potential upscaling in the longer term that could impact the more than 746 million people living in Europe.

The results and social innovations developed within the project will be shared on the Just Transition Platform, to be replicated in other regions.