Engaging Stakeholders in Climate Adaptation

By Elisa Fiorini Beckhauser

The final workshop session at ECCA2025 was on ‘Experiences, lessons and tools for stakeholder and citizen engagement in climate adaptation’.

It actively engaged with key aspects of effective and inclusive climate adaptation engagement. The audience worked in three groups, each representing a specific category of stakeholders: vulnerable groups, the private sector, and local authorities. They answered three questions:

1. What are the main challenges faced when engaging people in climate adaptation?

2. What examples do you know of successful and effective engagement initiatives?

3. What enabling conditions are needed for effective engagement strategies?

For vulnerable groups the main challenges identified were time constraints, financial limitations, managing expectations, considering cultural differences and the variety of ways people think and approach situations.

As for best practices in successful and effective engagement, climate assemblies, citizen science and local community action through participatory modelling emerged as promising approaches.

Finally, conditions that might advance public engagement included building awareness, implementing accountability, educating the next generation and including everyone in climate discussions.

As for the private sector, the main challenges are gatekeeping in locally adapted data sharing, a lack of clarity in the framework of rules, a lack of corporate social responsibility, a lack of technical skills to understand their specific corporate context, miscommunication, and difficulties finding win-win situations.

Successful strategies might include national network rail, pilot programs, and capacity assessments.

Key enabling factors for the private sector are understanding the context and benefits, having clarity about the innovation and its potential benefits, having clarity about the rules for engaging in public-private partnerships and identifying and collaborating with the best practitioners in the field.

Local authorities may face the following challenges: a lack of resources and capacity to implement engagement strategies, a lack of funding, reluctance due to the risks of shared decision-making, a lack of clear mandates or policy frameworks to support engagement governance practices, a lack of collaboration and coordination across different authorities, and bureaucracy.

Successful strategies include developing protocols that allow participants to share their input with decision-makers, creating communities of practice by sharing perspectives on specific projects on-site, and using different approaches, such as art initiatives, to enable people to express their perceptions of the situation.

Finally, to enable these strategies, there should be fundraising to increase resources, an institutional governance structure that allows for engagement, and increased expertise and skills among civil servants.

Chair:

Yara Shennan-Farpón (MIP4Adapt/Icatalist)

Speakers:

Marianne Whebe (MIP4Adapt/Icatalist)
Gloria Salmoral (MIP4Adapt/Icatalist)
Óscar Bernardez (MIP4Adapt/Fundación Universidad-Empresa Gallega)

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Engaging Stakeholders in Climate Adaptation

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