The selection committee has announced the results of the first CLIMAAX Open Call. The selected regions belong to 13 countries and will receive more than EUR 5.4 million cumulated funding. Applicants not selected during the first Open Call may participate in the second one, which will close on 15 October.
32 European regions, coming from 13 countries, have been selected to receive, together, more than €5,4 million to perform a regional Climate Risk Assessment. The selection committee has announced the results of the first open call of the CLIMAAX project which supplies up to €300,000 lump sum funding per selected proposal.
The selected beneficiaries – primarily public regional and local institutions – must be established in any EU Member States and their Overseas Countries and Territories or Horizon Europe Associated Countries. The first open call ran from 8 December, 2023 to 22 March, 2024.
The selection committee included representatives of the consortium partners as well as delegates from the Directorate-General for European Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid Operations, the Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre of the European Commission and its Joint Research Centre, and the Mission Secretariat/CINEA, as observers, who made the final selection from the 119 submitted proposals.
After an initial check, 16 submitted proposals were deemed non-eligible. After the 103 eligible applications were reviewed on the basis of an in/out scope screening, another 2 were deemed ineligible, 10 were out of scope and 91 were considered evaluable. The applications were evaluated according to the criteria of Relevance, Impact and Implementation – each criterion scores from 0 to 5 points. Unfortunately, 22 proposals did not meet the overall minimum threshold of 10 points (as the sum of the three criteria scores) or did not reach the minimum for each individual criterion (3 points).
The 69 applications that scored above the threshold received additional points to the overall score to prioritise regions or communities with high vulnerability and low adaptive capacity to climate change. This aspect was evaluated following the regional composed Vulnerability Index produced by the JRC Disaster Risk Management Knowledge Centre.
The final list of selected recipients consists of 32 applications; they will receive, together, €5.438.891. The EU grant contribution that each applicant may receive is based on a lump sum scheme applying a Country Correction Coefficient (CCC) that considers the country in which the third party is located. The maximum amount of financial support ranges between €115,227 and €300,000.
Greece counts the largest number of selected proposals (6, maximum per each country), followed by Bulgaria, Portugal, and Turkey (4). Three selected proposals came from Romania, two from Italy, Slovakia and Spain, one from Albania, France, Hungary, Netherlands Antilles (Curaçao) and Serbia.
Given the nature of the works required for the implementation, the grant is foreseen to be executed with the assistance of external services by the public authorities/institutions. This shall require the preparation of dedicated public procurements following the national procedures to acquire complementary technical knowledge needed to implement the regional/local multi-risk Climate Risk Assessments (CRA) in most of the sub-projects.
Applicants who were not selected in the first one are welcome to participate in the second Open Call, which was launched in the first week of July and will close on 15 October 2024.
Sectors
Risk drivers