The EU-funded Horizon Europe project, Adaptation AGORA that run from 2023 to 2025, 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.
Participation. Photo: Prostock-Studio/Getty Images
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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 Adaptation 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 set of pilot regions will constitute the co-production arena to co-design, co-develop and co-implement climate adaptation solutions. Adaptation 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.
Journal article / The authors analyse citizen engagement initiatives, examining aps between theory and practice, and key hurdles to surmount to enhance climate change adaptation.
Journal article / This study examines a staged co-creation process implemented across four pilot regions to engage diverse citizen groups in shaping soft adaptation measures.
Journal article / Through a knowledge co-production process in Malmö, this article explores its unintended consequences and implications for epistemic injustice.
Feature / At Adaptation Futures 2025, “Accelerating Adaptation into Action”, SEI researchers contributed expertise on climate finance, adaptation and co-production.
Past event / Join SEI’s sessions at Adaptation Futures 2025 to explore co-production, equity and innovation in climate adaptation.
The Adaptation 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).
Andreas Hoy
Senior Expert (Climate Systems and Energy Policy Unit)
Team Leader: Cities, Communities and Consumption; Senior Research Fellow
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