As climatic conditions are constantly changing and the frequency of extreme events increases, there is an urgency of planning, designing and retrofitting the built environment in order adapt it to present and future risks. Too frequently the built environment is a driver of vulnerability, rather than being a shelter for citizens. For this reason, mitigation and adaptation need to be pursued actively, putting built environment and human resilience at the center of a climate and future-proofing action. The MULTICLIMACT project aims to develop a mainstreamed framework and a tool for supporting public stakeholders and citizens to assess the resilience of the built environment and its people at multiple scales (buildings, urban areas, territories) against locally relevant natural and climatic hazards and supply-chains, as well as to support them to enhance their preparedness and responsiveness across their life cycle. The mainstreamed approach will include a method specifically targeted for including several types of built environment assets, including human well-being, health, and quality of life as an essential scale of analysis and action. MULTICLIMACT will support resilience-enabling ACTions by implementing a toolkit of 18 reliable, easy-to-implement and cost-effective Design methods, Materials, and Digital Solutions, enabling users to easily estimate the impact of their implementation on the resilience of the targeted asset, integrating a multidisciplinary approach integrating socio-economic, life, engineering, and climate disciplines. The MULTICLIMACT approach is integrated with relevant international and European initiatives, building upon existing knowledge and instruments, and demonstrating the proposed approach in four case studies that represent various geographical location, natural and climatic hazards, social and economic systems and scales of analysis, ranging from single buildings (including cultural heritage) to the urban and territorial scales.

When a patient is discovered to have cancer, one of the primary goals is to have the tumour removed by surgery. Although this provides excellent oncological control, it is associated with morbidity and functional problems in cancer survivors. Recent studies have shown that the immediacy to perform a resection does not always lead to improved clinical outcome. Furthermore, cancer surgery can often lead to complications where the quality of life for the patient is compromised by toxic side effects and /or damage to nerves, organs or healthy tissues. A number of recent clinical trials in the field of cancer surgery have advocated the concept of watch and wait, watchful waiting, active monitoring or surveillance, which are terms used to describe a monitoring strategy for cancer. The concept may be antithetical but the functional advantage of these alternatives is clear even though there is some concern about the risk. Though the evidence is still weak, current studies suggest that with adequate selection and follow-up, this oncological risk is small. A major consideration for clinicians is now to maintain quality of life for all patients. Our objective in this proposal is to implement novel approaches so that cancer surgery can be avoided, where we aim to (a) develop new monitoring technologies from industry so that the surveillance window can be increased to allow for better treatment options over time and to avoid surgery, (b) develop new ‘watch and wait’ strategies in order to study the behaviour of the cancer so that any risks to the patient can be minimised leading to a better clinical outcome and (c) train a new generation of preclinical and clinical scientists to be able to implement this new concept as standard of care and to maximise the benefits of an active monitoring policy.