The UNESCO Chair on Water-Related Disaster Risk Reduction at the University of Ljubljana, hosted by the Faculty of Civil and Geodetic Engineering, is a project partner at the EU Horizon project NATURE-DEMO (20’24-2028): Nature-Based Solutions for Climate-Resilient Infrastructure.
Our main contribution to the NATURE-DEMO project is to run one of the five demonstration sites – we have selected the Gradaščica River in SW Ljubljana as our (Slovenian) demonstration site.
All the NATURE-DEMO project results are continousla published on the NATURE-DEMO project main web pages. Here, on these web pages we will present the results of the Work Package #4 Deploy and demonstrate the regional nature-based solutions for DEMO #3 – Ljubljana, Slovenia.
The main construction works to secure flood safety in the SW part of the City of Ljubljana have been planned in several phases of a more general project on Flood control in the Gradaščica River basin (2017-2025). Only the Phase 1A is a part of the NATURE-DEMO project (see the map below). More on the general outline of the flood protection of the City of Ljubljana can be found on the Gradaščica project web pages. The project (estimated costs 67,738,032.10 EUR) is financed by the Republic of Slovenia (15%) and the Cohesion Fund of the European Union (85%). More about this project can be found in the Gradaščica project brochure (2021, pdf in Slovene). For the Phase 1A we made a machine translation of the brochure in English.
Areas with planned developments as part of the project – Phases 1A, 1B & 2.
DEMO #3 – MONITORING
The starting point for a continuous monitoring is the Buil-As-Is plan, prepared after the completion of all construction works for the Phase 1A & Phase 1B (construction works were finished in late 2025). This is a “background” snapshot for future monitoring of executed Nature-based Solutions during the Phase 1A & 1B. The Buil-AS-IS plan was prepared by combining classical surveying techniques (using total stations in selected cross sections) and UAV LiDAR measurements. The true “natural background” is represented by the state LiDAR measurements done in 2014 – before the first works started in the field for the Gradaščica project (2017-2025).