Greater Copenhagen is promoting growth and development in the largest Nordic metropolitan area, encompassing 4.4 million citizens in Southern Sweden and Eastern Denmark. Nicolai Juel Vædele is the director of Greater Copenhagen Green and responsible for their green transition. This summer, the organisation launched Living Lab for climate adaption, a Danish-Swedish public-private partnership that gathers 12 organisations, including The Capital Region of Denmark (Region Hovedstaden), Malmö city and Helsingborg city, Copenhagen Municipality, HOFOR, NOVAFOS, Sweden Water Research, The National Network for Climate Adaption (Det Nationale Netværk for Klimatilpasning), and Greater Copenhagen.
— For instance, Juel Vædele tells, we will help commercialize high solution weather radar data. This will help to predict major cloudbursts across Southern Scandinavia, thus saving billions of Danish Krones from climate damages. We have teamed up with the biggest players within this field being the major Danish and Swedish utility companies and the most prominent key players within scientific water research in this area. We’ll help them connect with the startup scene and commercialize their potential and reach international scaleup for these solutions. We believe we have some quite unique findings to offer the world, and therefore we call it and strive to be ”the next Silicon Valley of climate adaption”.
Climate change knows no national borders, Frank Brodersen at co-initiator The National Network for Climate Adaption states.
— So, it’s logical that we do something together across national borders and develop solutions that, among other things, can predict when the next violent weather will hit us. With digitalisation, we can make our climate adaptation smarter, so that we can optimize our public investments in both the water and environmental sectors in both countries. This initiative is open to everyone, so we encourage both authorities, companies, and scientific institutions to participate in the construction of a global powerhouse for climate adaptation.
Nicolai Juel Vædele, the initiative also includes Living Labs. What will they do?
— They will be partly virtual and partly physically located in Denmark and Sweden. At the moment, we are located at the Energy & Water Science Center — Greater Copenhagen Living Lab. It’s an innovative and experimental lab, which offers information and networking on energy and water supply in the past, present, and future, always seen from a sustainability perspective. We have already had more than 300 water and climate professionals from all over Scandinavia to visit our living labs.
Pictured are the three weather radars and their ownership. Christian Hørdum Andersen, senior advisor at Greater Copenhagen, explains:
— All three organisations are part of the new partnership and working together to fight the water by sharing data, to get to know faster when cloudbursts will happen and that helps in leading and moving water around in the region and leaving space for more water from cloudbursts.
