Benidorm prepares its proposals to be more resilient and climate-adapted

At the COP 25 Climate Summit held in Madrid in December 2019, Benidorm announced the development of its Municipal Plan for Adaptation to climate change. The mayor, Toni Pérez, did it at a thematic discussion on Smart Tourist Destinations, in the so-called ‘Green Zone’ of the international convention, being the first tourist municipality, DTI, to do so.

Last August the plan outline began to be developed planning the cartographic layers necessary for its execution and this morning its progress was presented at a meeting of the DTI Managing Body for the evaluation of the departments and the inclusion of possible new indicators.

As it was evident in the planning meeting, in accordance with the parameters recommended by international organizations in matters of the Environment and risk prevention, many of the implementation proposals were already being developed by Benidorm in the areas of sustainability, accessibility, together with innovation technology.

For Mayor Toni Pérez, after the meeting, "the plan that we designed for Benidorm is underway, well advanced, and next week we will complete its previous development". Pérez recalled that “Benidorm already has many of the approaches made in previous plans that are being developed and that we are now involved in a joint operation where adaptation proposals will be highlighted, which will be scalable, reinforcing the resilient character of Benidorm in the 21st century taking into account sustainability ”.

From the Climate Consultancy, Pablo Mirete has advanced today to DTI Management Body the basic lines of a Plan that analyzes, with its own metrics, the climate trends of the next 80 years, pointing out the risks and proposing the management of resources, the biodiversity of the term and the urban structure of the city, proposing proposals to optimize opportunities in the face of the incidence of meteorological variability and the incidence of extreme phenomena in shorter return periods.

The hydraulic infrastructures, considering the progress of the plan, will be the key, highlighting the actions already developed and those programmed that will give Benidorm a great capacity for resilience, according to the analysis of the plan in the RCP trajectories (adopted by the IPCC reports) for scenarios with efforts to mitigate low, moderate, high and extreme climatic adversities, contemplating the Albedo, Heat Island effects and the effects of rain, drought and maritime storms.

The Plan will advance measures to be developed on an urgent, relevant or maintenance basis and contemplates a traffic light system for achievements.

Among the measures to be implemented, energy efficiency - highly developed in Benidorm's municipal and hotel planning - plays a leading role together with the commitment to renewable energies and sustainable territorial planning seeking to improve protection against natural risks, in consonance with the articulation of the local planning on all the channels that cross the Municipal Term, which is already well advanced.

In the urban chapter, the initiatives will focus on improving the thermal envelopes of buildings (facades and roofs) as well as their bioclimatic design (orientation and ventilation). The EDUSI Benidorm Strategy is fully integrated into the parameters of the plan, as well as the issues of sustainable urban mobility and universal accessibility.

For the next meeting of the plan, they will be integrated into it, said Toni Pérez at the conclusion of the meeting, "the tractor projects that we are developing and are going to incorporate with the economic battery of proposals Benidorm DTI + Safe of the tourism sustainability plans in destination, the GIS platform of the set of indicators applied to monitoring in the Red.es program and the SDGs and the 2030 Agenda contemplated by Smart Destination Lab.

Pablo Mirete highlighted that the proposal of the Municipal Plan for Adaptation to Climate Change is to make viable proposals that can offer that capacity for adaptation and resilience that will be needed.