Integrated pathways of local adaptation and mitigation towards climate neutrality and resilience – Experience from the KNOWING project

In a race against time to limit climate change and to prepare for its consequences, global societies need to find effective strategies to simultaneously mitigate greenhouse gas emission and adapt to a changing climate. The European Commission mandates that all member states become carbon neutral by 2050; however, the specific actions towards these objectives are left to regional authorities, presenting complex challenges for local stakeholders and decision-makers. How can carbon emission be reduced or sequestered, while adapting to the growing risk of climate extremes, and while securing the well-being and prosperity of citizens? How to plan the adoption of sufficient measures in the coming decades, while preventing spill-over effects across sectors and objectives? Project KNOWING develops and implements a new methodology to explicitly address these challenges. Together with four regions – Granollers (Spain), Naples (Italy), South Westphalia (Germany) and Tallinn (Estonia) – we co-create sets of specific interventions for adaptation and for mitigation. We use ~12 domain-specific, state-of-the-art computer models, to simulate future localized climate hazards and to evaluate the effectiveness of the selected interventions. We then integrate the results of these model into a system dynamics framework, which enables us to quantify the collective effect of all interventions towards the stated goals, and to chart pathways of action until 2050. We will present the approach, the solutions to the emerging challenges, and preliminary results for our four regions.