Building up a Digital Academy in AGORA project to aware citizens, improve access to and use of climate data supporting adaptation

The AGORA (https://adaptationagora.eu/) project aims to support communities and regions exploiting a broad range of approaches, mechanisms and initiatives to meaningfully and effectively engage citizens, civil society organisations, academics, experts, policy-makers, entrepreneurs, marginalities and other relevant actors in all the transformation steps towards a climate-resilient Europe. Beyond the state-of-the-art, AGORA aims to promote societal transformational processes through transdisciplinary tools and approaches in different social, economic and political contexts.  The ambition is to accelerate and enhance the adaptation process by sharing innovative problem-oriented climate adaptation solutions that could be widely adopted across Europe, considering societal transformations and the awareness that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. A set of pilot regions in Italy, Sweden, Germany, and Spain constitutes the co-production arena to co-design, co-develop, and co-implement climate adaptation solutions through specific-context in-person activities (for engagement, capacity building, governance and tackling disinformation). Regions and Communities joining the Mission on Adaptation will also be involved as followers feeding and learning from the AGORA initiative. A roadmap for transformative change and large-scale citizen engagement will be developed to transfer effective policy instruments and ensure a long-term legacy, promoting climate justice, gender equality and equity. AGORA's legacy will be to increase citizens' adaptive capacity and empowerment to proactively support decision-making processes and transformative potential to anticipate innovative behaviour. The pillar of the AGORA project consists in the Digital AGORA, an online space that supports citizens, local government, municipal services and networks, and communities to play a relevant and conscious role in co-developed decision-making processes. It will host two Digital Academies that will aspire to guide and support the targeted audiences to access and use Climate Data and to monitor Climate Risks, and to oppose Climate Change Disinformation. The main goal of the former Digital Academy is to facilitate access and usage of high quality, open source Climate Data as well as Climate Risks Data. The goal is achieved by mapping existing data, sources and platforms that will be gathered in “ad hoc built” inventories on climate data, adaptation and climate risk hubs. The second goal is to empower citizens, stakeholders and policy makers through technical reports and training documents on how to access and use climate data for adaptation. In this perspective, the Digital Academy is based on courses with key scientific information on the usage of climate data at different level of knowledge (entry, base and advanced level). The last goal is to promote information and initiatives fostering climate adaptation supported by citizen science activities. The Digital Academy to access and use Climate Data and to monitor Climate Risks is co-designed and co-developed in different public events, as ECCA (www.ecca2023.eu) and SISC conference 2023 (www.sisclima.it). Such events allowed to connect climate adaptation practitioners with the scientific community, to gather the users’ requirements and provide suggestions and ideas for the advancements in the building up of the Digital Academy.