impaQt project started
The impaQt project, funded under the EU Programme for the Environment and Climate Action (LIFE), started on 1 August 2025, with EFB among its participants.
As cities worldwide grapple with urgent climate challenges, it becomes imperative to not only devise robust technical and processual solutions but also to accelerate their implementation. Despite the availability of such solutions, our urban areas continue to be vulnerable to the intensifying impacts of climate change, including increasing temperatures and heavy rainfall events.
This project is about the pursuit of climate-resilient urban environments, by focusing on sustainable, integrative, and cross-sectoral planning and implementation at scale, including innovative impact-based financing instruments. Thus the project is focusing on two demo areas.
The first area is the neighbourhood development project “climate-boulevard” Melk (Austria), including housing and traffic routes. While the structural transformation of a parking-place into a so-called inner-city climate forest will be implemented as a demo and the corresponding impact will be monitored during the project period, a holistic cross-siloed impact planning process, impact-based financing and co-creation structures will be implemented for the whole neighbourhood area by setting up a living lab for the entire neighbourhood development.
The second neighbourhood transformation is in Berlin Charlottenburg (Germany) – with the demo of a completely rainwater self-sufficient street, the Ilsenburgerstraße.
Through co-creative Living Labs in each demo area, conflicting objectives will be identified and negotiated between all relevant stakeholders, including developers, property owners, citizens, enterprises and public hand. The aim is generating scalable and transferable solutions at the whole district. To ensure long-lasting and active engagement, the living lab will be further developed to a newly to be found privately managed local company in order to activate citizen engagement at the district level by fostering open innovation via a number of cross-sectoral (planning and management-) tools, disseminating knowledge on climate change adaptation.
For more information about the project, please visit https://www.enu.at/was-wir-tun/impaqt-life