The PRO-CLIMATE along with its sister project NEUROCLIMA took center stage at the Adaptation AGORA Final Event on November 11, where we presented the project’s innovative Living Lab approach and engaged a high-level audience in co-creating adaptation solutions.

The presentation, delivered to a distinguished audience including EU Climate Pact Ambassadors, Policymakers, representatives from other Horizon Europe (HE) projects, academia, and local and regional authorities, focused heavily on PRO-CLIMATE’s methodology for achieving proactive community adaptation.

Co-Session on Climate Adaptation in Coastal Towns

A key highlight was a highly interactive co-creation session, co-led with the NEUROCLIMA project. During the hands-on breakout session, which utilized a Miro board for collaborative mapping, participants designed a rapid Living Lab for a coastal town reliant on tourism and its port.

In this simulated environment, participants successfully completed the core steps of a Living Lab design: stakeholder mapping, identifying barriers and policy owners, and designing actions. The session culminated in defining the core policy implications, summarized by the following collective insight on governance improvement:

“The structured vulnerability mapping and citizen assembly, formalized by the Local Climate Adaptation Officer (LCAO) role, improves governance by establishing a permanent, accountable co-decision mechanism driven by shared data (KPI: View of the Dataset), while simultaneously fostering behavioural change by transforming formerly resistant authorities into co-managers and shifting the public from passive victims to active stakeholders (KPI: Number of Stakeholders Engaged).”

This engaging co-session powerfully demonstrated the effectiveness of the Living Lab model in breaking down complex challenges into actionable, locally-driven solutions, and highlighted the successful collaboration between PRO-CLIMATE and NEUROCLIMA in advancing climate resilience through participatory methods.