Speakers repeatedly returned to the same uncomfortable truth: No city is risk-free anymore. Climate hazards increasingly collide with political, social, and infrastructure pressures, creating compound impacts that can overwhelm hazard-by-hazard planning. Several cities stressed that this underlines a shift in what resilience must be capable of: It’s not only about managing emergencies, but about continuously adapting systems while inequalities and vulnerabilities are already present. A recurring implication was the need for cross-sector coordination across vital systems because cascading failures often travel through interdependencies between energy, water, transport, waste, health and data, rather than through just a single department. The Regional Resilience Journey (RRJ), developed within the Pathways2Resilience project, was referenced as a useful framing: Systemic resilience requires looking beyond climate hazards alone and planning for multiple stressors through a long-

Heat came through as a governance and public-health challenge as much as an urban design challenge. Participants noted that vulnerable groups - especially children and older people - often don’t perceive themselves as at risk, despite being among the most affected. Better risk communication and targeted outreach were flagged as essential to turn warning systems into behavioural change and protection. More broadly, stronger approaches treat heat explicitly as a public health risk with clear responsibility, dedicated staffing and sustained outreach.

Cooling centres were discussed as an important safety net, but several voices stressed the implementation gap: cooling a room does not cool a neighbourhood. The broader objective is reducing exposure both indoors and outdoors, through urban form, shading, surface and material choices, greening, operational measures, and social outreach so that heat adaptation doesn’t collapse into “find air conditioning.” Initiatives such as the Covenant of Mayors’ Cities REFRESH campaign were highlighted as a practical way to mainstream these measures by helping cities share actions and accelerate uptake beyond individual projects. In parallel, the European Heat Adaptation Community, launched on Heat Action Day 2025, was referenced as a growing

Sessions on outermost regions made the polycrises dynamic concrete. Speakers described overlapping climate risks: Coastal erosion, biodiversity loss and water stress alongside public health and infrastructure pressures. The recurring message: Support needs to be cross-sectoral, grounded in local realities, and flexible enough to work where baseline conditions are already strained. REGILIENCE’s policy brief reinforces this, framing EU outermost regions as highly vulnerable but also pioneering “living labs” whose adaptation solutions can be highly transferable to continental

Across the forum, nature-based solutions (NbS) repeatedly came up as one of the most practical ways to respond to new extremes while tackling co-benefits that matter in a polycrisis: Cooling, water management, biodiversity, health, and liveability. The point made in multiple sessions was to use NbS as a systems lever as they cut across sectors and are therefore well suited to the cascading, interdependent risks cities are now facing.

Several examples illustrated a much needed shift from policy to action. Rotterdam’s WeerWoord programme and related measures such as green roofs and water squares were discussed as citywide approaches that integrate adaptation across policies and combine stormwater

EURESFO 2025 in Rotterdam made clear that polycrises are no longer a scenario but a design condition. The task now is to move from a fragmented view of multiple crises to a systems perspective that can handle cascading and compounding risks within polycrises. This is also where EU policy is moving, with the European Commission preparing an integrated framework for European climate resilience and risk management and a stronger push to connect initiatives such as the EU Missions (e.g., Adaptation, Cities, Ocean & Waters, Soil) so cross-