Europe’s cities are some of the world’s greatest tourism destinations. The socio-economic impact of tourism is extraordinary and urban tourism, but it brings at the same time a range of negative externalities, including high levels of unsustainable resource consumption and waste production. In comparison with other cities, tourist cities have to face additional challenges related to waste prevention and management due to their geographical and climatic conditions, the seasonality of tourism flow and the specificity of tourism industry and of tourists as waste producers. UrBAN-WASTE will support policy makers in answering these challenges and in developing strategies that aim at reducing the amount of municipal waste production and at further support the re-use, recycle, collection and disposal of waste in tourist cities. In doing so UrBAN-WASTE will adopt and apply the urban metabolism approach to support the switch to a circular model where waste is considered as resource and reintegrated in the urban flow. UrBAN-WASTE will perform a metabolic analysis of the state of art of urban metabolism in 11 pilot cities. In parallel a participatory process involving all the relevant stakeholders will be set up through a mobilization and mutual learning action plan. These inputs will be integrated in the strategies along with a review of the most innovative existing technologies and practices in the field of waste management and prevention. The strategies will then be implemented in the 11 cities and the results will be monitored and disseminated facilitating the transfer and adaptation of the project outcomes in other cases.

The SYNERGY project intends to promote preparedness with the coherent and synergic involvement of the different actors of disaster management. These actors include first and second responders, citizens, communities, education systems, authorities and public administrations, business companies and practitioners. The project will concentrate on five needs identified for disaster preparedness: i) involvement of all relevant actors in building preparedness; ii) strengthening preparedness education and training; iii) communicating with citizens; iv) management of spontaneous volunteers; v) ensuring sustainability of solutions for preparedness. To address these needs SYNERGIES is leveraging the knowledge, experience, and results of five H2020 projects (ENGAGE, RESILOC, LINKS, IMPACT, BUILDERS), and one nationally funded project (Ready2Help). The results of these projects will be integrated with practitioners' best practices and experiences, revised, and improved, increasing their level of maturity. Targeted research, including social science expertise, will be dedicated to covering remaining gaps and supporting the integration work. Three Real Preparedness Cases will offer the opportunity to orient the project work, evaluate the progress and demonstrate the final results. These Preparedness Cases are real situations in which stakeholders intend to improve preparedness with a better involvement and empowerment of citizens. The SYNERGIES activities will last 36 months with a Consortium composed of 16 partners, representative of all the types of stakeholders in DRM, including research organizations, business companies, first and second responders, civil society organizations, and authorities.