Mountains cover 30% of the land area and are home to 17% of the EU´s population, meaning that every 6th EU citizen lives in mountainous areas. While we often associate mountains with breathtaking landscapes that offer perfect sites for relaxation, in truth, mountains are much more than that. In fact, mountains play a crucial role in our daily lives by providing vital resources and key community systems to the global population. Mountains like other areas face unprecedented challenges in terms of climate change (CC), however mountain ecosystems are more sensitive to CC. The harmful conditions provoked by CC are exacerbated by the significant deficits in adaptation responses mountainous areas have, stemming from several existing gaps, including shortcomings in CCA options, deficits in the uptake and the lack of coherence. MountResilience has been formulated to increase the adaptation capacity of mountainous regions and communities so as to strengthen climate resilience within the European mountainous biogeographical region (Alpine biogeographical region). The project aims to accelerate the climate resilient transformation of 10 of the most relevant communities and regions located in the mountains in 9 European countries. 6 of the regions will develop and test transformative CCA solutions (technological and social innovations with nature-based solutions at their core). These solutions will address policy, governance, societal needs and behaviours, technological requirements, public and financing targets, and CC risks typical of mountainous areas. Regional quadruple-helix partnerships will use open innovation, participatory decision-making, stakeholder engagement approaches, and effective communication to mobilise, engage, and reach out to key communities. The remaining 4 regions will serve as "replicator" regions, repurposing CCA solutions and lessons learned from the demo regions in their regions through special initiatives to improve their adaptive capacity.

Currently there is a range of Nature-based solutions (NBS) emerging mostly with strong public funding elements, but a market for NBS has not yet emerged. While mostly small scale NBS are implemented as pilots for urban resilience to climate change the full range of economic and societal benefits for NBS are not systematically understood and mapped and are not sufficiently used to back the business and investment case for NBS. The numerous benefits may include mitigation and adaptation to climate change (including the reduction of urban heat island effect and flood mitigation), reduction of pollution, improved biodiversity and ecosystem services, increased well-being for citizens, including physical and mental health or recreation, social cohesion, and community building. While effort for climate change mitigation and adaptation are increasing, the role of NBS in this context is not well understood. In particular, risk reduction of NBS for the private and public insurance sector has not yet been systematically included in economic valuation of NBS. Holistic understanding of benefits and benefit flows however are important for the society including upscaling and maximising the benefits achievable with NBS and activation financing for NBS. The overall project aim of Invest4Nature is to gain a better understanding of the economic and financial performance of NBS, considering their role for mitigation as well as climate risk reduction, to promote upscaling and investments in NBS, and to accelerate market uptake. The project has a strong involvement of stakeholders to co-produce solutions, having several NBS Living Labs and a wide NBS community (including project developers, decision makers and funding and financing institutions) at hand, co-producing new evaluation and financing approaches as well as tools, covering NBS in different contexts (e.g., urban, rural, coastal). This is the basis for empowering stakeholders and create and structure a future NBS market.