The team is made up of Luis Roca (coordinator), Giuliano Blancato, Oscar Andreu Sánchez, Jesús Muñoz Bertomeu, Rafael Boluda Hernández, Eugenio Gómez Minguet and Marina Sierra Rodríguez.

RealUrbanGreen: Testing a holistic model to co-design and jointly implement healthy urban green spaces for climate-resilient cities and towns

The Mediterranean region is one of the planet's critical areas that will suffer the effects of climate change. In this area, and therefore in its cities, extreme heat waves, droughts, and the resulting water shortages are particularly severe, as are intense rainfall. Furthermore, pollution from human activities is highly prevalent in cities across the Mediterranean region. All of these effects jeopardize the health and functionality of urban green spaces, limiting their ability to regulate temperature, retain water, and provide essential ecosystem services for cities and their inhabitants.
In many cases, when planning and managing urban green spaces in Mediterranean cities and towns, climate change-related data and projections have not been adequately incorporated, nor have potential sources of pollution been taken into account. This shortcoming limits the resilience of these spaces, compromising the ecosystem services they provide to the urban population. The lack of coordination across sectors and disciplines, as well as limited citizen participation, reduces the effectiveness of interventions and the capacity to adapt to extreme climate events, which projections indicate will become increasingly frequent and intense. 
To address these issues, UrbanRealGreen focuses its efforts on guiding the planning and management of Urban Green Spaces (UGS) in the EuroMED region toward strategies for adaptation and resilience-building in the face of the climate crisis, ensuring that these spaces can maintain their ecological and social functions in a context of increasing environmental pressures. By identifying the main challenges threatening UGSs and engaging citizens, the project will co-design and co-manage green areas. The project will implement and evaluate a participatory model in eight representative urban green spaces in the European Mediterranean region, actively involving local authorities, citizens, and other key stakeholders, with the aim of increasing the capacity to adapt to climate change and promoting more resilient, sustainable, and less polluted cities.

The main objective is to develop a validated holistic model that can pave the way for the design and implementation of more sustainable and resilient EVU improvement plans.
The University of Valencia will contribute academic, scientific, and technical support to the development and implementation of the model. It will be responsible for developing a questionnaire for the preliminary assessment of UGS, which will consider several key aspects, such as the health of the UGS, their adaptive capacity to climate change, the contribution of UGS to the resilience and adaptation of the urban area, and other ecosystem services that UGS can offer. It will also provide a set of citizen science-based tools to assess urban green spaces (UGS) from the perspective of soil, vegetation, and other aspects. These tools are designed to be directly applied by UGS users, prioritizing active community participation, ensuring the accuracy of the assessment, and in most cases without requiring specialized technical support. The UV team will be responsible for training project partners in the selection and subsequent implementation of the tools, so that they understand their correct use and can maximize the benefits of their application for UGS assessment. In addition, it will focus on identifying nature-based solutions to improve the priority areas highlighted during the assessment.
UV is present throughout the project, participating in all work packages (WPs). UV will be involved in the development of the roadmap and state of the art for WP1, which, once tested, will be merged into a holistic model along with the roadmaps for WP2 and WP3. UV will provide ongoing advice on the selection, implementation, and monitoring of solutions (e.g., climate protection, climate change adaptation and mitigation, soil contamination, among others). UV will provide technical support to all partners in the pilot projects to facilitate the implementation of the WP1 roadmap, as well as to accurately select, implement, and monitor appropriate solutions for WP2 and WP3. UV will also contribute to the scientific content of the transfer and capitalization actions for WP4.

Link of the Proyect: Home page - Interreg Euro-MED - RealUrbanGreen

Consortium:

• The Most Beautiful Villages of Italy (Italia) – partner líder

• Risorse per Roma Ltd (Italia)

• Make it Better, Association for Innovation & Social Economy (Portugal)

• Scientific Research Center Bistra PTUJ (Eslovenia)

• City of Sarajevo (Bosnia y Herzegovina)

• Cyprus Energy Agency (Chipre)

• CommonSpace (Grecia)

• Universidad de Valencia (España)

• Foundación Musol (España)

Financier: Interreg Euro-MED.

Total budget: 2.497.915,00 €.

Grant: 1.998.332,00 €.

Duration: 04/2025 – 12/2027.