Co-creation of climate adaptation and mitigation pathways in Granollers. The KNOWING project

Climate change has been globally recognised as an existential threat requiring urgent action to avoid catastrophic consequences, this includes not only the elimination of net emissions of green-house gases by 2050 but also the urgent need to adapt to unavoidable impacts. In this context, the objective of KNOWING project (https://knowing-climate.eu/) is to develop a modelling framework to help understand and quantify the interactions between impacts and risks of climate change, mitigation pathways and adaptation strategies. The framework is used to assess the interrelations between public and private adaptation and mitigation strategies to identify mitigation pathways along optimised combinations of interventions in different climate impact contexts (CICs).

One of the demonstrators of the flooding and infrastructure CIC is Granollers (Spain), a Mediterranean inland municipality facing flooding (fluvial and pluvial) and heatwaves risks. The main objective of this demonstrator within KNOWING project is to co-create a feasible adaptation pathway to decrease flooding risks and ensure that the mitigation objectives are met. To do so, a co-creation process, based on 4 collaborative workshops (WS) has been developed with the objectives of: (WS1) engaging local stakeholders to ensure successful set-up and implementation of pathways; (WS2) formulating adaptation hypothesis and setting challenges; (WS3) establishing vision scenarios, setting priorities and defining the actionable adaptation and mitigation pathways (based also on the results of advanced modelling tools supporting the prioritization of actions and the identification of trade-offs and interactions) and (WS4) presentation of pathways and engagement of strategic regional partners and follower regions. In parallel, an interactive demonstrator dialog has been also conducted to co-create and test the communication tools resulting from KNOWING project and integrating them within local policy/planning processes.