Empowering Citizens for Climate Action

In the wake of Earth Day, the EU funded project CLIMAS offers valuable insight into how citizen engagement can support meaningful climate adaptation efforts. Now in its final year, the project is advancing local climate adaptation through a network of city pilots, living labs and climate assemblies—placing citizens at the core of the transition to climate resilience. All these stakeholders will help co-design solutions aided by an innovative problem-oriented climate adaptation toolbox provided by the project.

On 9 April, CLIMAS and its sister project, Adaptation AGORA, co-hosted the online event “Citizen engagement in climate adaptation processes”. The session served as a valuable milestone in both projects’ trajectories, offering insights into citizen engagement methods, outcomes, and lessons learned from pilots in Rome, Zaragoza, Malmö and Dresden, as well as from climate assemblies in Catalunya, Riga, and Edermünde.

The event demonstrated that citizen participation can go far beyond consultation—it can directly shape climate adaptation strategies by integrating people’s experiences, insights and values. The CLIMAS toolbox can facilitate this meaningful approach and the results show it: From co-designed urban greening plans in Malmö to deliberative forums in Riga tackling flood risks, the pilots illustrate how people-centred adaptation can be both inclusive and effective.

By placing adaptation at the centre of its activities, CLIMAS project aligns closely with the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change goals.

As the project enters its final months, CLIMAS is setting an example of how empowering citizens can lead to more resilient and responsive local climate actions—an approach worth celebrating on the occasion of the Earth Day. To mark the occasion, CLIMAS released a second video to present the Toolbox. This is not all, CLIMAS will make available more tools in the coming weeks under Tools and Guidelines, stay tuned.

For more information, please also see the EU factsheet.