The RESCCUE Project is an H2020 research project that aims to help cities around the world to become more resilient to physical, social, and economic challenges, using the water sector as the central point of the approach. RESCCUE will generate models and tools to bring this objective to practice, while delivering a framework enabling city resilience assessment, planning and management. This will be achieved by integrating software tools, methods, and new knowledge related to the detailed urban services performance into novel and promising loosely coupled models (integrated models), multi-risk assessment method, and a comprehensive resilience platform. These tools will allow urban resilience assessment from a multisectorial approach, for current and future climate change scenarios, including multiple hazards and cascading effects. The RESCCUE approach will be implemented in three EU cities (Barcelona, Bristol, and Lisbon) and, with the support of UN-Habitat, disseminate their results among other cities belonging to major international networks. The aim of this paper is to present the main goals of this project, as well as the approach followed and the main expected results after the four years of implementation, so other cities around the world can use the RESCCUE approach to increase their resilience.

In a context of high uncertainty of hydro-climatic variables, the development of updated methods to assess climate change impacts is as important as the provision of improved climate change data. This article presents the impacts of climate change on the flooding problems concerning a critical area of Barcelona and the assessment of the effectiveness of structural and nonstructural measures to cope with such impacts. For this purpose, a specific study tackling climate change influence on extreme precipitation in Barcelona and a detailed 1D/2D-coupled model were used. Once the model was developed and calibrated, several scenarios of adaptation measures were considered to cope with climate change effects for the 2050 horizon. Results concerning these scenarios were compared to a defined 'business as usual scenario'. Climate change impacts were assessed in terms of flood hazard and risk maps concerning vehicular and pedestrian circulation for several return periods (1, 10 and 100 years) for all the considered scenarios. Additionally, direct tangible damages were estimated using depth-damage curves. The expected annual damage of the area is obtained by combining hazard and vulnerability levels using a Geographic Information System-based toolbox. By undertaking a cost-benefit analysis, the effectiveness of the strategies is assessed.

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