Saue Municipality as a Living Lab for Climate Adaptation Pilots and Demonstrations

Saue Municipality (Estonia) is a mid-sized peri-urban municipality in the capital region (population ~26,000), combining fast-growing urban areas, industrial zones, valuable agricultural land, forests, and dispersed rural settlements. This territorial diversity makes Saue a highly suitable real-life testing ground for climate adaptation solutions across multiple land-use types.

Saue is a signatory of the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change and is currently finalising its Climate Adaptation Strategy, Action Plan and Investment Plan, supported by the Pathways2Resilience (P2R) programme. These documents provide a strong strategic and operational framework, including prioritised risks, concrete measures, and an implementation roadmap, allowing rapid integration of Horizon Europe pilots into municipal practice.

The municipality is interested in joining Horizon Europe consortia as a demonstration, pilot or replication partner, offering:

• real-life municipal environments for testing adaptation solutions,

• political and administrative commitment to experimentation,

• access to local data, stakeholders and infrastructure,

• capacity to co-design, implement and evaluate pilots with research and industry partners.

Saue is particularly interested in cooperation related to:

• multi-level governance and local implementation of adaptation,

• nature-based solutions and green-blue infrastructure,

• climate-resilient spatial planning and land-use management,

• adaptation solutions for peri-urban and rural contexts (incl. agri-food systems),

• linking climate adaptation with investment planning and financing.

As a municipality that is moving from planning to implementation, Saue is well positioned to support testing, validation and upscaling of solutions developed under Horizon Europe Missions, while ensuring replicability for other European local authorities.