Thirty-three European regions, coming from 14 countries, have been selected to receive, together, more than EUR 5,5 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 EUR 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 8th of December 2023 to 22nd of 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, 10 were out of scope and 93 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 71 applications that scored above the threshold received additional points to the overall score to prioritize 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 33 applications; they will receive, together, EUR 5,511,148. 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 EUR 115.227 and EUR 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 Georgia, Italy, and Slovakia, one from Albania, France, Hungary, Netherlands Antilles (Curaçao), Serbia, and Spain. 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 1st week of July and will close on the 15th of October 2024.