The EU-funded Horizon Europe project, Adaptation AGORA that run from 2023 to 2025, aimed to improve decision-making for climate change adaptation. It seeked 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 was to accelerate and scale up adaptation processes for building a climate-resilient Europe.
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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 supported the overall objectives of the Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change. It aimed to promote democracy, climate justice, gender equality, and equity in climate-related decision-making processes. It also seeked 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 used transdisciplinary tools and approaches to promote societal, transformational processes in different social, economic, and political contexts.
The project focused on the co-design and co-creation of innovative, problem-oriented climate-adaptation solutions. These cooperative processes tapped into the insights of a wide variety of people: citizens, academics, experts, policymakers, entrepreneurs, representatives of civil society organizations, and other relevant actors. The aim was 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 aimed to create:
A set of pilot regions constituted to the co-production arena to co-design, co-develop and co-implement climate adaptation solutions. Adaptation AGORA also developed a roadmap to advance transformational change and to increase citizen engagement. The roadmap was 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 was 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).
Team Leader: Cities, Communities and Consumption; Senior Research Fellow
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Project / Regions4Climate will implement innovative actions to enhance climate resilience within the real-life environments of partner regions.
Project / ClimVis aims to prepare a tailored implementation concept of a transnational, multilinguistic visualisation tool of observed and projected climate information.
Tool / Tandem guidance is an interactive, online tool to help scientists and decision-makers collaborate to improve climate change adaptation planning and policies.
