Co-producing urban climate and air-quality services in Barcelona

Heat and air pollution are major health hazards in many European cities. Mitigating these hazards requires limiting exposure and understanding and reducing people’s vulnerability. Urban planners and city policy makers are acutely aware of this, with many climate adaptation plans replete with options for such mitigation. Yet, until recently, a major gap in applied research has been how to ensure that climate predictions can actively support urban decision makers in this work. That is, rarely do such plans account for city-scale information related to future risk. The climate services literature is clear: although there is no shortage of climate information, closing the “usage gap” so that this information can directly connect to existing decision contexts has largely remained elusive. 

We are involved as a ‘boundary organisation’ for in-depth Barcelona case studies in the European projects Impetus4Change (Improving Near-Term Climate Predictions for Societal Transformation)[1] and UrbanAIR (Urban Simulation for

Air Quality & Heat Resilience Strategies)[2]. This presentation will detail our efforts to oversee the co-production process and directly engage with local stakeholders. This includes structured stakeholder mapping and user selection, efforts and tips for building lasting trusted relations with stakeholders, a commentary on the iterative dynamic of co-design and co-development, and the development and implementation of a co-evaluation framework that assesses the co-production process and its outputs. 

 

[1] https://impetus4change.eu/

[2] https://www.urbanair-project.eu/