To accelerate local decarbonization efforts and foster informed decision-making on climate action, the LOCALISED project became part of the MAIA community, which collects networks platforms, expertise and research on climate change, with the overall aim of increasing project visibility and engagement.

The MAIA Multiply program serves as a platform to bring together initiatives committed to tackling the challenges of climate change. Indeed, it aims to amplify the impact of projects like LOCALISED by fostering connections and facilitating knowledge exchange. 

Currently, we have taken the opportunity offered by MAIA to highlight our project through a featured News. This article allows us to introduce LOCALISED by promoting the engagement of urban decarbonisation practitioners, regional authorities and governance experts, and all key actors in shaping a sustainable, climate-resilient future.

In the implementation of the project’s communication, dissemination and exploitation strategy, it is crucial to leverage resources and create synergies in order to extend the transfer of results for uptake by other stakeholders and to build a community that enables the exploration of different outreach-related activities. By joining the MAIA Multiply programme, LOCALISED is entering a new opportunity to generate collective impact.

In today’s research landscape, Gender and Diversity are increasingly recognized as vital elements of working culture and integral components of multidisciplinary research teams. However, while many projects acknowledge their importance, gender and diversity monitoring is often less prominent. 

In LOCALISED, we have incorporated gender and diversity as fundamental aspects of our project management approach, with regular monitoring by all project partners. Indeed, we have developed a methodology, outlined in our official report (LOCALISED Deliverable 1.5), to guide our own project, but also to serve as a prototype for promoting gender mainstreaming, inclusivity and diversity in all Horizon 2020/Horizon Europe research projects.

In order to provide insights on how to translate our commitment to gender and diversity into tangible actions and outcomes within multidisciplinary research projects, we have created an easy-to-use and engaging factsheet which provides essential information in a concise form. The “Gender and Diversity monitoring in multidisciplinary research projects” factsheet outlines the main strategies employed within the LOCALISED project to ensure gender equality and diversity at four levels (institutional, structural, communicational, and research). Special attention is given to the professional and personal links and understanding between team members in project activities.

Climate justice demonstration. CC: BlueLENS (www.blue.lens)

The University of Twente – LOCALISED partner – has recently strengthened its professional, research and practice expertise in the domain of climate change. Along with the Green Hub Twente, the platform for sustainability transformation at the UT, and the UT Climate Centre, the recent appointment of Debra Roberts as a part-time Professor at the Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC) at the University of Twente clearly bolsters UT’s commitment to build capacity to and conduct research on one of the most pressing challenges of this century.

The week of the 6th of November, prof. Roberts visited her new part-time Faculty and shared her extensive knowledge and expertise with its members. She left significant statements while holding several meetings with staff members and research groups, presenting colloquiums, and responding to interviews. Prof. Roberts is an energetic supporter of equity and justice aspects. One of her remarkable quotes were “[…] You are not going to get the ambitious climate action you want or the ambitious change of in the current city circumstances without an improvement on equity and justice […]”.

Indeed, ensuring a just transition and just adaptation not only ensures protecting everyone from climate change impacts but also makes implementing our climate actions more feasible. Justice has been increasingly discussed in the realm of climate action in recent years. Several authors detected a risk of increasing existing vulnerabilities or introducing new vulnerabilities while implementing mitigation or adaptation actions[1,2]. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other well-recognised authors have identified these facts as malmitigation or maladaptation. While at the beginning of the uptake of climate actions, their outcomes were still unknown, now, decades of experience in implementing climate actions have taught us what, in theory, logical actions such as increasing taxes on local fuel could do to economically vulnerable citizens[3–7]. Obviously, communities suffering from these unintended negative effects of climate actions are not happy about this[8]. Thus, in many countries around the globe, the critique of low-carbon transitions by social groups is rising[8].

Usually, critique is grounded in the final distribution of benefits or burdens, i.e., distributional injustice, or related to attempts that harm their local identity without any previous consultation, i.e. procedural injustice[2,8–10]. Planning climate actions with social groups being part of the process – increasing procedural and recognitional justice – also increases the potential for distributional justice—hence, equitable and just climate action. While doing so, the acceptability of climate actions is likely to increase[3,11]. Moreover, the involvement of stakeholders might also increase the technical and/or economic capacity of social groups, making climate action more likely to succeed overall [12,13].

We shall be aware that justice and equity are not merely random factors we must include in our climate agenda but that they help achieve climate goals—we should make them paradigms of climate action, as Prof. Roberts remarks.

REFERENCES

[1] A.T. Amorim-Maia, I. Anguelovski, E. Chu, J. Connolly, Intersectional climate justice: A conceptual pathway for bridging adaptation planning, transformative action, and social equity, Urban Clim. 41 (2022) 101053. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.uclim.2021.101053.

[2] S. Hughes, M. Hoffmann, Just urban transitions: Toward a research agenda, Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Clim. Chang. 11 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.640.

[3] P. Kashwan, Climate justice in the global North: An introduction, Case Stud. Environ. 5 (2021) 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1525/cse.2021.1125003.

[4] K. Mintz-Woo, Carbon tax ethics, Wiley Interdiscip. Rev. Clim. Chang. (2023) 1–15. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.858.

[5] B.K. Sovacool, Who are the victims of low-carbon transitions? Towards a political ecology of climate change mitigation, Energy Res. Soc. Sci. 73 (2021) 101916. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2021.101916.

[6] B.K. Sovacool, P. Newell, S. Carley, J. Fanzo, Equity, technological innovation and sustainable behaviour in a low-carbon future, Nat. Hum. Behav. 6 (2022) 326–337. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01257-8.

[7] B.K. Sovacool, B. Linnér, M.E. Goodsite, The political economy of climate adaptation, Nat. Publ. Gr. 5 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1038/nclimate2665.

[8] R.E. Shelton, H. Eakin, Who’s fighting for justice?: Advocacy in energy justice and just transition scholarship, Environ. Res. Lett. 17 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1088/1748-9326/ac7341.

[9] P. Tschakert, M. Parsons, E. Atkins, A. Garcia, N. Godden, N. Gonda, K.P. Henrique, S. Sallu, K. Steen, G. Ziervogel, Methodological lessons for negotiating power, political capabilities, and resilience in research on climate change responses, World Dev. 167 (2023) 106247. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.worlddev.2023.106247.

[10] C. Godinho, What do we know about the employment impacts of climate policies? A review of the ex post literature, WIREs Clim. Chang. 13 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.794.

[11] K. Swanson, Equity in Urban Climate Change Adaptation Planning: A Review of Research, Urban Plan. 6 (2021) 287–297. https://doi.org/10.17645/up.v6i4.4399.

[12] K. Swanson, Centering Equity and Justice in Participatory Climate Action Planning: Guidance for Urban Governance Actors, Plan. Theory Pract. 24 (2023) 207–223. https://doi.org/10.1080/14649357.2023.2189288.

[13] A. Garvey, J.B. Norman, M. Büchs, J. Barrett, A “spatially just” transition? A critical review of regional equity in decarbonisation pathways, Energy Res. Soc. Sci. 88 (2022) 102630. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.erss.2022.102630.

Systematic observation of  the Jury meeting of the Viennese district of Floridsdorf in October 2023. Photo credit: © MA 20 / Fürthner

In the months of October and November 2023, our LOCALISED partner ÖGUT has taken part in the meetings of the recently formed citizen juries in three districts of Vienna, organized in the context of the Vienna Klimateams project.

The City of Vienna is confronting the link between the climate crisis and the issue of democratic policy making in different ways. One of them is the Vienna Klimateams project, initiated in 2022. This innovative project consists in developing a participatory budget at the district level, through which diverse groups of citizens can propose  different socially just climate measures which then get rated by experts and transformed into project proposals in a joint process of citizens and experts. In a final step, a citizen jury chosen by lottery decides on which projects will be implemented with the available budget, allowing citizens to take the future of their districts in their own hands. The Vienna Klimateams groundbreaking approach earned it recognition. The project was indeed nominated for the ÖGUT Umwelt Prize of 2022 and won the Austrian Administration Prize in the category of Participation in 2023.

Maxie Riemenschneider from ÖGUT observed the whole participatory process and in the months of October and November, carried out a systematic observation of the Jury process. She observed the group processes and interactions leading to consensual decision over the best climate projects at the district level. The systematic observation of citizen juries is crucial for LOCALISED, because from these meetings we are able to gather relevant input for the development of the Citizen Engagement Blueprint – one of the final products of the LOCALISED project, aimed at guiding policy and decision makers to engage with citizens and specifically vulnerable groups when developing climate strategies. Thus, the events organized in the context of the Vienna Klimateams represent a mutual learning experience between LOCALISED project partners, citizens, politicians and city administrations.

“Observing citizens’ juries has been an incredibly inspiring experience. The diverse groups of selected citizens all demonstrated a deep sense of responsibility towards the future development of their districts and high motivation for the steps to come.”, Maxie Riemenschneider says. “We are looking forward to following and supporting the future developments of the project and putting our learnings into practice with the creation of the Citizen Engagement Blueprint!”.

Citizen Jury of Floridsdorf reaching consensus on some of the projects to be implemented, October 2023. Photo credit: © MA 20 / Fürthner