AGORA - A Gathering place to cO-design and co-cReate Adaptation

AGORA – A Gathering place to cO-design and co-cReate Adaptation

The EU-funded Horizon Europe project, AGORA, aims to improve decision-making for climate change adaptation. It seeks to leverage and advance best practices, innovative approaches, policy instruments and governance mechanisms to meaningfully and effectively engage communities and regions in climate actions. The goal is to accelerate and scale up adaptation processes for building a climate-resilient Europe.

Illustration about participation. Photo: Prostock-Studio/Getty Images

In ancient Greece, the agora was a central public gathering space that sat at the heart of all activities in city-states. Using this metaphor as a source of inspiration, the AGORA project (A Gathering place to cO-design and co-cReate Adaptation). The project supports the overall objectives of the Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change. It aims to promote democracy, climate justice, gender equality, and equity in climate-related decision-making processes. It also seeks to foster adaptive capacity and to boost citizens’ empowerment as part of a wider effort to support effective decision-making and related processes. The project will use transdisciplinary tools and approaches to promote societal, transformational processes in different social, economic, and political contexts.

The project will focus on the co-design and co-creation of innovative, problem-oriented climate-adaptation solutions. These cooperative processes will tap the insights of a wide variety of people: citizens, academics, experts, policymakers, entrepreneurs, representatives of civil society organizations, and other relevant actors. The aim is to generate solutions that can be widely adopted in Europe, and that can be tailored to specific contexts and needs to address ongoing socioeconomic change.

The project will create:

A package of digital tools and co-developed frameworks relying on multi-directional communication technologies.
Innovative, problem-oriented climate-adaptation solutions.
Blueprints for effective decision-making and collaborative processes that build on the dialogue among stakeholders and on the integration of different types of knowledge.

A set of pilot regions will constitute the co-production arena to co-design, co-develop and co-implement climate adaptation solutions. AGORA will also develop a roadmap to advance transformational change and to increase citizen engagement. The roadmap is intended to help lead to the creation of effective policy instruments that are transferable to other contexts and that have the potential to last over the long term.

Partners

Fondazione Centro Euro-Mediterraneo sui Cambiamenti Climatici (CMCC) (Italy) lead partner
Verein der Europäischen Bürgerwissenschaften e.V. / European CitizenScience Association (ECSA) (Germany)
Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) (Spain)
Local Governments for Sustainability (ICLEI) European Secretariat GmbH (ICLEI Europasekretariat GmbH) (ICLEI) (Germany)
Agenzia per la Promozione della Ricerca Europea (APRE) (Italy)
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) (Austria)
CIMA Foundation (CIMA) (Italy)
Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI HQ) (Sweden)
Stockholm Environment Institute, Oxford Centre (SEI Oxford) (UK)
Stockholm Environment Institute, Tallinn Centre (SEI Tallinn) (Estonia)
Ibercivis Foundation (IBE) (Spain)
Athens Technology Center (ATC) (Greece)
Université de Genève (UniGE) (Switzerland)

Funding

The AGORA project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe Framework Programme for Research and Innovation (2021-2027) under grant agreement No. 101093921 (HORIZON-MISS-2021-CLIMA-02-05 – Local engagement of citizens in the co-creation of societal transformational change for climate resilience).