Adapting to Climate Change: How to Engage the Community

The climate crisis does not impact all places equally. Each location is exposed to specific risks: prolonged droughts, flash floods, landslides, wildfires. Regardless of the type of risk a region is most prone to, it is essential for each community to adopt a strategy, plan, or measures for adaptation to minimize the effects of climate change on people, ecosystems, and infrastructure.

For adaptation measures to be effective, it is important that they result from collaboration between public authorities and the community—understood as the collective of citizens and all active local entities. Only by integrating the knowledge and skills of the community with those of experts can decisions be made that reflect the diverse perspectives of the people who live in the area.

But how can we overturn the traditional process of policy formulation, often centralized and hierarchical, to adopt a collaborative model in which the community's voice is heard and valued?

To answer this question, Eurac Research, in collaboration with Fondazione Cima and the Politecnico di Milano, has created a manual that shows, step by step, how to engage a community in the design and monitoring of a strategy, plan, or adaptation measures for climate change. The manual is primarily intended for local governments, technical offices, and policymakers in small to medium-sized municipalities. However, it is also a valuable resource for citizens and local organizations wishing to actively participate in the decision-making process.

The manual was developed within the RETURN project, which focuses on studying risks associated with both natural and human-made disasters in the context of climate change. Precisely it resulted from activity conducted in WP7.4 where we identify methods and procedures useful to assist policymakers in creating strategies for risk management and climate change adaptation.