Cocreation of a Living Lab as a tool to deal with extreme events and improve Climate Change mitigation and adaptation: The Barcelona Living Lab on extreme events

The impacts of Climate Change in extensive metropolitan areas have been one of the hot topics of the last years. To deal with these impacts and comply with European Green Deal, a transformation process that simultaneously encompasses mitigation and adaptation needs to be achieved. For this transformation to take place, there is the need to mobilize social commitment: citizens must be engaged to change their habits. To this aim, in the context of I-CHANGE project, the Barcelona Living Lab on Extreme Events (BLLEE) has been created. The Metropolitan area of Barcelona, composed of 36 municipalities and over 3,239,337 inhabitants in 636 km2, is a good example of a Mediterranean coastal region that can be severely affected by climate change impacts. As is extensively documented, meteorological extreme events occur with a high frequency in this region, being heavy rainfalls and extreme temperatures the most common ones (Gilabert et al. 2021, Llasat et al. 2021), and the frequency trends of both these events are expected to increase with Climate Change. Consequently, the challenges of the Barcelona Living lab are multiple and related to the urban floods and flash floods, the increase in vulnerability and exposure to high temperatures and the unequally distributed impacts and damages associated with Climate Change.

This contribution will present the methodology followed in the development of the BLLEE. The process is divided into four stages: mapping of stakeholders, identification of needs and research questions through online meetings and surveys, a first workshop with stakeholders to select the main challenges, and the creation of a steering committee to supervise the implementation. In the Stakeholders Mapping potential stakeholders from different sectors (Academia, civil society, public sector and industry) were selected according to the BLLEE interests (a total of 122 persons/teams). In the second stage, the stakeholders were contacted and individual online meetings were organized according to their different backgrounds. The third step, consisted on the first in-person stakeholder workshop, with the successful participation of 33 representatives from the different identified entities from the first and second steps. A mix of presentations, participative dynamics, and a design thinking activity were used to co-define and improve the challenges of the BLLEE, to identify the barriers and drivers to the implementation of already defined adaptation routes and to propose new adaptation solutions. Finally, the implementation of some measures and citizen science activities that were previously agreed with the stakeholders. This step has recently started and has a double objective: to acquire more information about extreme events in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona and to modify habits, improving the resilience to face those extremes and reducing the GHG footprint. Periodic meetings with the stakeholders are going to be held to keep the discussion on the course of action. In this communication, the key aspects identified through the participatory activities and workshops in these first stages will be shown.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement 101037193.