Last April, Viladecans together with the city of Lorquí, visited Limassol (Cyprus) to learn more about climate neutrality.
Viladecans was chosen last September 2023 as a Twin City for the NetZero Cities Twinning Learning Programme which aims to enable a two-way knowledge transfer between Pilot and Twin Cities, focusing on climate-neutrality ambitions and activities tackling multiple emission domains and systemic barriers.
Together with Lorquí, Viladecans will be learning from the LC3 – Limassol City Cooling Challenge which showcases scalable and transferable actions to reduce energy consumption for cooling in a southern coastal city.
To this end, last April, Viladecans visited the city of Limassol (Cyprus) on a two-day meeting where the first day working session was focused on the stakeholder’s engagements and the second day was dedicated to visit the spaces which will be rehabilitated:
A school.
A social centre located in a church.
A residential building.
The Pilot L3C is within an area of action (Zakaki area), which is a residential fabric next to an area of new development, where they want to act from different projects:
• reduce traffic on the central avenue of the neighbourhood
• provide the neighbourhood with interconnected green spaces
• reduce the problems of dumping waste and litter on the street
During the second day, Mattheos Santamouris, Anita Lawrence Professor of High Performance Architecture in the University of New South Wales in Australia, presented the importance of the scientific approach. Which makes it possible to measure the problems generated by the increase in temperature at all levels: environmental, human-social, political problems, economics, social…
The good news, as Santamouris said, is that there are mitigation technologies such as supercooling materials that must be applied in conjunction with other actions such as renaturalization. The scientific approach makes it possible to monetize the losses that will occur, but also the benefits of acting
The next visit of the project is planned to happen next October/November in Spain.
