The Eurecat Climate Resilience Center (CRC) in Amposta has launched the Living Lab Ebre Bioterritori, a space created to promote “the bioeconomy” through participatory projects agreed with the territory. They work to define proposals for new green infrastructures, prioritize them and plan them to promote sustainable development, in this case, of the Ebro delta. The laboratory also works, through BioResilMed, to train socioeconomic agents in “more sustainable” practices.
The recently inaugurated Living Lab of the Center for Climate Resilience has initiated the first projects to “foster the bioeconomy”. As Nil Ãlvarez, a researcher from the Climate Change line, has detailed, one of the projects underway is the PECT EbreBioTerritori, a program to develop green infrastructures that are worked on from the new laboratory with the participation and opinion of territorial actors.
At the moment, they have carried out a participatory process with socioeconomic agents, administrations, companies and citizens to “collect different proposals”. Now they must prioritize them and make a development plan that the administrations “can endorse and carry out in the future, in a sustainable manner.”
The CRC’s Living Lab will also have “a relevant role” in the BioResilMed project, of the Biodiversity Foundation, which is financed with European Next Generation funds, and which wants to “promote the bioeconomy of Mediterranean landscapes”. The search from Amposta “focuses” on the Delta de l’Ebre, but spaces such as the Valencian Albufera or the dryland crops in the interior of Granada, AlmerÃa and Murcia are also part of the project.
Through the Living Lab, they will “transfer knowledge” and will focus on “training” socioeconomic agents “in more sustainable practices”, whether it is about the ecological cultivation of rice or woody crops from the interior plateaus, about promoting the link between ecology and biology, or how to obtain a “possible benefit” to reduce greenhouse gases. Ãlvarez recalls that Europe is developing a law on carbon-free markets and “carbon credits” for farmers -economic compensation to reduce emissions-.
The CRC wants to generate other Living Labs throughout the country. The scientific director of the center and of the Eurecat Climate Change line, Carles Ibáñez, asserted that Terres de l’Ebre is “kilometre zero” for research on climate change, but points out that “they want to reach all needs of the country” and “work with institutions, NGOs, research centers and administrations” to “generate transversal projects”. The center is already working to find synergies with other existing laboratories and to create new ones.
Ibáñez has reaffirmed that the Living Labs are spaces to “work with economic and social actors, create a dynamic of collaboration and continuous improvement, and establish objectives that interest society and the local economy.” In the Ebro, the center “must detect needs, pose realistic challenges and seek financing in order to be catalysts for the ecological transition in the territory.”
The researchers point out that this year’s extreme drought “should be an opportunity to see what the situation of the Delta de l’Ebre might be like in the future”, and generate valuable data, with the analysis of current impacts, and adaptation tools. . In this situation, the new Living Lab found less reluctance and discrepancies among the territorial agents and “many opportunities to work together effectively” are appearing, under the leadership of the Center for Climate Resilience. The more support received, “the more results will be achieved”, remarks the scientific director.
Currently, the CRC has generated 14 jobs in Amposta, a dozen of them in the line of Climate Change. The growth perspective for the next five years is to increase the number of projects to thirty. “At the rate we are going, we will be able to achieve it,” said Carles Ibáñez.
The head of corporate development Joan Marc Escudero has highlighted that this property is equipped with different sensors and external monitoring that will make it possible to create “a digital twin of any building”. The data that will be collected are temperature, humidity and air flows, data on the climatic situation of the Delta de l’Ebre that can be extrapolated to other areas.
Through the European IClimaBuild project, the building has been designed with wooden panels and interchangeable facades of various materials to carry out tests and pots on the interaction that the materials generate in the users. The objective is energy saving and draw conclusions about “the best construction strategies” for “more sustainable buildings”. It will also be the first building that can be deconstructed.
The construction is done dry, with screwed joints and wooden structures. “It could be disassembled like any Lego piece and reused in other constructions and equipment,” Escudero explained. The fact that it is made of wood should not pose a greater risk in case of fire. “The burning time with which the evacuation time is linked is longer in a wooden building because the steel in the concrete deforms quickly and the structure collapses,” he says.
