CLIMAS | Citizens engagement toolbox for dealing with climate change adaptation

Climate change is one of the most critical issues to tackle today as it is foreseen to have detrimental social, environmental and economic impacts in the near future. The last climate change events, such as flooding in Germany and Belgium in both Continental and Atlantic regions, heat waves and lack of water in both Mediterranean and Boreal regions, show that the policymakers, experts and stakeholders’ actions are not enough, and a 360º citizens engagement is urgently needed. Therefore, we need to learn from the good experience in citizens’ engagement in climate change action and build up citizens` supporting infrastructure for climate adaptation measures to help the 150 European regions and local communities to resist. Climate assemblies and Living labs are considered as sustainable and reasonable tools to stimulate deliberative democracy in climate policymaking.

The ambition of CLIMAS is to support a transformation to climate resilience by offering an innovative problem-oriented climate adoption Toolbox, co-designed together with stakeholders by applying a values-based approach, design thinking methods and citizen science mechanisms. It is expected that the use of the Toolbox will anticipate possible tensions, points of controversy and dilemmas vis-a-vis the adaptation to climate change – therefore enabling empowerment and engagement strategies that produce a society “resilient by design”. In addition, CLIMAS will include the empirical component for testing this Toolbox and formulating scientific-based guidelines for policymakers on how to shift Climate Assemblies from technically based deliberations that belong to climate change experts to multi-stakeholders deliberations based on solving the dilemmas from a bottom-up, more societal and value-based perspective. CLIMAS outcomes will positively influence policy development and awareness-raising process and offer sustainable strategies to enhance the acceptance of citizens’ led decisions by policymakers.

cambiaMO is one of the initiating entities of CLIMAS and is responsible for the Testing the Toolbox in real deliberative processes developed at the three Climate Assemblies (Catalonia; City of Edermünde, Germany; City of Riga, Latvia) and the three Living Labs (Ebro Delta, Spain; Chios Island, Greece; Vilnius, Lithuania).