As climate risks become increasingly complex and interconnected, effective adaptation requires more than better data and technical solutions. Climate change impacts are growing, making it is essential to find ways to bring together diverse knowledge, experiences and perspectives to make informed decisions that can help build wider resilience.

Responding to escalating impacts and needs, SEI has improved its Tandem guidance to better support the collaborative decision-making processes. SEI has updated the guidance by leveraging new insights and experiences gained through recent work in Europe. There, SEI used the Tandem framework to help stakeholders make decisions to help them deal with an array of growing challenges – including increasing flood risks, wildfire threats, institutional coordination challenges and emergency preparedness needs.

The resulting, updated Tandem guidance is freely available on weADAPT, SEI’s global climate change adaptation knowledge-sharing platform. 

Building on insights from real-world decision-making

SEI’s experiences in research and provision of climate services over many years underscored the importance of designing collaborative processes that can address real decision-making needs. In 2019, we created Tandem to help researchers, practitioners, decision-makers and community representatives co-design climate change adaptation strategies and disaster risk reduction interventions.

From its inception, Tandem aimed to help stakeholders move from understanding shared challenges to developing, implementing and sustaining locally relevant solutions. We have found that such collaborative processes can strengthen relationships between institutions and create pathways for learning and cooperation that can carry on beyond the life of any individual project. Indeed, our work has shown that the co-design process itself builds capacities — which can be more valuable than the final output of a given, finite project.

We originally developed Tandem to improve the relevance and usability of climate services through Living Labs in southern Africa. Since then, Tandem has evolved, through applications across Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America, including rural, urban and transboundary contexts, through the SEI Climate Services Initiative.

The latest guidance builds on this experience, incorporating lessons from the EU-funded Innovation Action, DIRECTED – Disaster resilience for extreme climate events through improved data accessibility, communication and risk governance project, where Tandem was applied and refined in four European Real-world labs to strengthen connections between climate change adaptation, disaster risk management and risk governance, supporting Risk-Tandem and communication, data and governance interoperability.

Taking users through phases of the process

The updated framework guides users through four interconnected, iterative phases:

• Scope: Understand risks, vulnerability and impacts, identify stakeholders and establish the foundations for collaboration.
• Co-explore: Build a shared understanding of challenges, goals, governance arrangements and information needs.
• Co-design: Imagine new futures, identify, appraise and develop interventions, considering different perspectives, assumptions, future uncertainties, trade-offs and the risk of maladaptation.
• Integrate and sustain: Evaluate outcomes, embed learning and effective interventions into institutional processes, and identify opportunities to sustain and scale their benefits.

Rather than prescribing a linear process, Tandem encourages users to revisit these phases as knowledge, relationships, capacities and priorities evolve.

Emphasizing learning by doing

A central feature of the updated guidance is its emphasis on learning by doing. Alongside guiding questions, users can access training modules, downloadable facilitation canvases and collaborative workshop resources to apply Tandem in their own contexts.

The guidance places greater emphasis on key, emerging topics, among them using systems thinking, addressing cascading risks, and preventing maladaptation. The updates offer: 

• Expanded scope: Stronger integration of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction to include compound and cascading risks, governance challenges and maladaptation.
• Greater focus on implementation: More explicit consideration of institutional responsibilities, monitoring and learning, and sustaining or scaling interventions.
• Improved learning experience: Capacity-development modules supporting practical application of the framework.

Building trust and capacities

These resources help practitioners:

• Build trust, shared ownership and meaningful participation across stakeholder groups.
• Understand interacting climate and non-climate risks, vulnerabilities and governance challenges.
• Bring together scientific, local, Indigenous and practitioner knowledge.
• Co-design and evaluate interventions, making assumptions, trade-offs and potential unintended consequences explicit.
• Strengthen individual and institutional capacities for collaboration, reflection and learning.
• Translate co-produced knowledge into decisions, policies and sustained action.

Learning from the escalating climate challenges confronting Europe

The DIRECTED project has provided SEI with opportunities to test and strengthen Tandem in practice. in four different regions: 

• The Rhine-Erft region of Germany – This region is seeking to address flooding risks, based on lessons learned from the catastrophic European floods from 2021, and the area’s drought risks.
• The capital region of Denmark – This region is seeking to improve its preparation and response to coupled hazards, such as heavy rainfall and coastal flooding.
• The Emilia-Romagna region of Italy – This region is seeking to address risks of wildfires, extreme flooding, storm surges and multi-hazard climate risks.
• The Danube region, a multi-country basin that includes Vienna in Austria, and, in Hungary, West Balaton and the wider Zala region – This region is seeking to many risks. In Vienna, a main concern is pluvial flooding. In Hungary, officials face complex hazards, including floods, droughts, wildfires and mudslides. 

These areas operated as the project’s Real-word labs, allowing us to explore and discover ways to make approaches more accessible and transferable – all the while recognizing that successful co-production must always be adapted to local contexts.