Step by step towards climate resilience – Second REGILIENCE Open Training Session

As climate change continues to pose a significant threat to our environment and communities, it’s important that we take steps to build resilience against its effects. The REGILIENCE project is one such initiative that aims to support European regions in their efforts towards climate resilience.  

In the recent REGILIENCE Open Training Session, held on 21 April 2022, on the topic of “Step by step towards climate resilience”, speakers shared valuable insights and experiences to help participants develop the skills needed to boost resilience. The event, moderated by Jen Heemann (IEECP), was part of the REGILIENCE Open Training Session, which aims to share knowledge and inspiration to help regions structure their climate resilience journey.

The training session provided insight into pathway development approaches including user experience reports. It focused on technical and sectoral approaches to resilience. It explored available solutions and showcased good practices from regions to enable skills for boosting resilience. The goal was to provide know-how and inspiration on how to structure your climate resilience journey. The session explored tools to structure climate resilience pathways, concrete results and implementation of nature-based solutions, engagement of stakeholders and citizens, and sharing of inspiring good practice solutions. 

Speakers at the session shared their expertise on various topics. 

• Josipa Arapović (REGEA) provided insight into thethe principles and practices of transformational pathways and illustrated good practices to achieve transformative changes including implementation in real-world contexts. The importance of identifying barriers to allow an easier and more smooth implementation has been highlighted and tools for the climate resilience journey developed by the REGIELIENCE project cluster introduced 
• Lucy Gregersen (EEA) and Linda Romanovska (Fresh Thoughts) presented the Adaptation Support Tool (AST) within the Climate-ADAPT platform and the importance of the tool to navigate the available information on the Climate-ADAPT website. They demonstrated live how to use the Adaptation Support Tool (AST) to identify the most relevant knowledge for all the steps of the adaptation policy cycle and how to screen the extensive knowledge available on the quality-assured database proven by external experts. 
• Filiep Dewitte and Lynn Michaux (Verhaert) presented the TransfromAr playbook on resilience pathways development and the creation process. The aim of this tool is to provide local people with hands-on information on how to pursue climate adaptation. The focus on a wide variety of users from public or private entities increases the usability of the tool. With this purpose, the book contains information about climate adaptation, instructions on how to lead the designed series of 3 workshops, and canvases and tools to ease the process of making transformational adaptation pathways visual and simplified. 
• Giles Rickard (Westcountry Rivers Trust) reported on his experience as first user of the  TransfromAr playbook supporting the agricultural sector. He provided insights on the process and user experience as well as on the outcomes of the case study. The feedback from the first testing helped to further increase the usability of the tool. 
• Amaya Soto (CETMAR) showcased the experience of the Galicia shellfish gatherers and mussel aquaculture farmers with the implementation of the methods of the TransfromAr playbook. It was applied following the proposed steps of the tool (identifying, planning, implementing, and reporting). The outcomes including the feedback from the local community offered useful ideas for adaptation. 

 Key takeaways: 

• Regional actors can get information, guidance, and support from different sources to structure and succeed in their climate resilience journey.  
• The Adaptation Support Tool offered on the Climate-ADAPT website helps to identify available materials and information according to your advancement on climate resilience developments. 
• The playbook developed within the TransformAr project gives regional actors guidance on how to codesign regional climate resilience pathways with local stakeholders and citizens. 
• Different approaches to engaging local communities and implementing the methods of the TransfromAr playbook have shown equally successful and convincing results in the pathway development as well as in the identification of users with the agreed actions and their support during the implementation. 

If you have missed the session, you can access the slides as well as the recordings. You can learn more about all past and help us tailor future sessions according to your needs on the dedicated REGILIENCE page here.  

You can watch the full recording below: