As we enter an important new phase in the LOCALISED communication of “Consolidate, Engage, and Disseminate”, we are excited to share the latest developments with our community. We are refining our strategies, enhancing engagement with interested actors around our project, and strengthening collaborations with other projects and networks.

Consolidation implies the harmonisation of our efforts and resources. We are working to ensure that the various research outputs of the project are integrated, and all partners are involved in communicating about them. Once a week one of the LOCALISED partners is writing an article that we share on our blog, X and LinkedIn; moreover we organise biweekly meetings to keep all of us updated. Vision, objectives and insights of LOCALIDED are also shared within quick video interviews that we have made with representatives of the consortium.

Engagement with the community is at the heart of the LOCALISED project. We recognize the importance of fostering stronger connections and we are intensifying our efforts to engage with local stakeholders, partners, and beneficiaries. For this purpose, the LOCALISED partner Climate Media Factory has started a co-design and interaction process with several stakeholders to guarantee that the Decarbonisation Profiler (release planned for early 2025) will be both useful and user-friendly. The same will take place for the Business Consultant tool, aiming at businesses in order to get insights into effective mitigation and adaptation options. 

To demonstrate our tools and to involve target groups in providing feedback, we plan to organise replication and up-scaling events and initiatives, starting already during the development phase of both tools. These events serve as opportunities to promote knowledge sharing, empowering communities to replicate and customise our solutions.

We are also working on improving the comprehensibility of our results. We are creating visually appealing materials that simplify complex information and make our findings more understandable to a broad audience. As one example we have prepared a leaflet to share the “SOIs for SECAPs definition and assessment” which has been developed during the project by the LOCALISED partner IREC. In addition, after our review meeting the Deliverable 1.5 was judged interesting and useful, therefore we are creating a document to easily share the information and knowledge to a wider audience. Another example is the “Gender and Diversity in H2020 projects” report, written by the LOCALISED partner ÖGUT which was considered a best practice example for other Horizon 2020 and Horizon Europe projects during the first external review on our project. Here we are currently preparing an information sheet, summarising the highlights.

Last but not least, working together with other projects and networks that share our vision and mission is hopefully amplifying our impact and promoting the exchange of innovative ideas. As we move forward, we are strengthening our collaboration to effectively inform local and regional actors in Europe on what can be achieved in regard to decarbonization at local and regional level and how they can adapt to and mitigate climate change scenarios. We have already participated in several meetings organised by the Green Deal Support Office and presented a success story and we are now building our collaboration with the MAIA Community. Moreover, a linkage with the Covenant of Mayor has been established and will be strengthened in the next few months. 

Image Credit: Blaine O’Neill / CC BY-NC 3.0

One aim of the LOCALISED project is to support smaller cities and regions in setting up ambitious climate action plans towards net-zero emissions as soon as possible. This will happen through the »Decarbonisation Profiler«, a state-of-the-art planning tool which will be available from early spring 2025. To guarantee that this tool is both useful and user-friendly, the LOCALISED project partners have been conducting several stakeholder interactions coordinated by the Climate Media Factory (CMF) (some first insights from this process can be found in this Deliverable).

Beyond the user experience level, we also want to better understand the political processes within which the Decarbonisation Profiler will be integrated. How do cities around the world govern the socio-ecological complexities of urban climate politics? And what do city administrations need to not only draft, but also implement effective and socially just climate policies? 

To find answers to these questions, Tobias Gralke from the Climate Media Factory has been talking to multiple experts in urban climate politics throughout the last months. To see what can be learned from bigger cities for climate politics in smaller ones, he also went on a research trip to Tokyo in August 2023. 

Many of the collected insights confirm the importance of considering political processes in the tool development, e.g., negotiations between different sectors and government departments or social conflicts that occur in the implementation of certain measures. Conceptually, this is a big difference: does a tool “only” suggest suitable measures and instruments to set up a climate plan or does it also stimulate open discussions within city administrations and urban civil societies?

Why this is important in practice, can be observed in Tokyo. The Metropolitan Region has published several ambitious climate strategy papers. These are, however, less impressive when it comes to their implementation. The current conflict around the Jingu Gaien Park, for instance, highlights the obvious contradictions between the explicit goal of making Tokyo a „city filled with water and greenery“ (Tokyo Sustainability Action 2023, p. 75) and the plan to cut down more than 1000 trees in this popular public space. More participation opportunities for citizens would arguably have helped (if not avoided such conflicts) to co-create shared, alternative plans for bringing Tokyo’s abstract sustainability strategy into a more concrete reality. The conflict also shows, however, the transformative potential of urban climate politics. While climate communication on national and international levels often remains abstract and technical, climate policies on the local scale can be more relevant for citizens because they directly affect their everyday environment. The people protesting against the redevelopment plans of Jingu Gaien Park are not primarily concerned about the tree felling but rather refer to other meanings of the place (e.g. the cultural importance of the baseball stadium on site). 

How to consider these kinds of political and processual factors in the tool development will be a task for the upcoming months. Starting in November 2023, the Climate Media Factory will conduct a series of focus group workshops with potential future users from local and regional administrations in Europe to test and collect feedback on the different Profiler versions.

If you’re interested in discussing and/or testing the tool development with us, you’re more than welcome to get in touch with Tobias Gralke.

The Institute of Fluid-Flow Machinery PAS(IMP PAN) with cooperation of the Institute of Fundamental Technological Research PAS (IPPT-PAN) and Warmińsko-Mazurski University in Olsztyn organised 11th Wdzydzeanum conference on Fluid-Solid Interaction in Wdzydze Kiszewskie – from 3rd to 7th of September.

The conference continues the history of the Fluid-Solid Interaction Workshops, but this year the organisation team decided to change the form to conference. While the main sessions were focussed around thermodynamics and material science, the conference also hosted sessions on other topics.

One of those was a special session discussing the human aspect of energy technologies and promoting new technologies to people. In that session, J. Verstraete – from the Szewalski Institute of Fluid-Flow Machinery, Polish Academy of Science, partner of LOCALISED – presented the concept of the project as well as aspects relating to the available data and dataprocessing.