Bernat Solé, the Catalan Government’s Minister of Foreign Action, Institutional Relations and Transparency, today visited Eurecat’s Amposta site. It is home to the centre’s Department of Climate Change which is laying the foundations for what will be a future centre of excellence in climate resilience.
Eurecat’s Department of Climate Change is part of the technology centre’s Sustainability Division and targets unlocking strategies to pinpoint climate change impacts coupled with adaptation and mitigation technologies. In Terres de l’Ebre, one of its most significant specialisation strands is the environmental challenges in the Delta and how to address them both there and also along the rest of Catalonia’s coastline.
“The Eurecat model is a fine example of how to make holistic progress in meeting the great challenges we face as a society,” said the Minister during his visit. “The commitment of institutions and government to bring together in the same venue research and development, businesses, new technologies, internationalisation and all the stakeholders involved enables us to move towards achieving the 2030 Agenda and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals.”
“By weaving multi-stakeholder partnerships as the SDGs urge us to do, we can help accomplish them while also weathering this crisis and shaping a more resilient and sustainable society to tackle future challenges such as the pandemic we are experiencing at the moment.”
The pandemic “has brought to the forefront concern for the health of the planet which had already been on the rise beforehand,” noted Xavier Torra, chair of Eurecat. People “are increasingly aware that we need to be eco-friendly in everything we do.”
To make this process easier, Eurecat “has multi-sector and multi-technology capabilities to help mitigate and adapt to climate change,” pointed out Xavier López, the technology centre’s Chief Operating and Corporate Officer. They are combined with infrastructures which “enable scientific knowledge to be scaled up so as to make improvements geared towards steadily making headway in the green transition.” Against this background, Eurecat “works with businesses to tackle the challenge of climate change in their processes and services and also as a generator of new business models.”
The minister was accompanied by Francesc Xavier Pallarès, the Catalan Government’s regional officer in Terres de l’Ebre, Alfons González, Director General of European and Mediterranean Affairs, and Eva Doya, the minister’s Deputy Chief of Staff.
Eurecat was represented by Xavier Torra, the technology centre’s chair; Xavier López, Chief Operating and Corporate Officer; Carles Ibáñez, director of the Department of Climate Change; Marc Crescenti, manager of Eurecat Amposta; and Nuno Caiola, a researcher in the Department of Climate Change in the Sustainability Division. Also joining the visit was Adam Tomás, the mayor of Amposta, whose local council has been closely involved from the outset in driving the Eurecat site in Amposta and its operations in the battle against climate change.
