OLD REPORT

The 2nd External Advisory Board (EAB) meeting report is finally ready. The EAB meeting took place online on November the 15th, 2024 organised by Deep Blue with the support of all CLIMAS partners.

The meeting main goal was that of sharing our preliminary insights on stakeholder needs’ and expectations, to develop a set of tools which could be tangibly and positively impacting Climate Assemblies. The CLIMAS Toolbox will soon enter its testing phase and this first expert feedback session was the ideal opportunity to collect feedback and better steer upcoming activities. Thanks to a matchmaking session organised by EIP, our partner responsible for the engagement of local institutions across different EU regions, EAB members and partners could agree on planning bilateral meetings and document review sessions.

A diversified group of six experts joined online, with work package leaders moderating discussions and Q&A sessions.

Overview of participants’ expertise

1.	Johnny	Stormonth-Darling	​Iswe Foundation
2.	Alexandra	Gogou	HCMR​
3.	Paulo	Rosa	JRC makerspace​
4.	Drosos	Koutsoubas	AEGEAN​
5.	Ieva	Česnulaitytė	DemocracyNext
6.	–	–	UB

1 – Representative from the ISWE Foundation
2 – Professor of Earth Sciences, Oceanography and Climate Change at the HCMR​ – Hellenic Centre for Marine Research
3 – Representative from the JRC makerspace​ and expert in deliberative democracy
4 – Professor and expert of Citizen Science at the AEGEAN​ University – School of the Environment Department of Marine Sciences
5 – Representative from DemocracyNext
6 – Professor expert on citizen science at the University of Barcelona

Meeting report

• 10:00 | Tour de table DBL​

As usual the first part of the meeting was dedicated to the “tour de table”. Participants were asked about their preferences in terms of recordings and publication of their feedback and input. This public report reflects such preferences and the exchange among partners and advisory board members is reported as a discussion between CLIMAS and the AB Group as a whole.

• 10:15 | Speed-intro + Q&A VILNIUS TECH​

Monika Maciuliene from Vilnius Tech shortly summarized the project challenge, ambition and first year’s results, quickly going over the main contents of the slides shared with all EAB members prior to the meeting.

• 10:30 | Presentation of the testing outcomes of the current CLIMAS tools​

Maria Alonso Raposo from cambiaMo presented the main outcomes of the testing activities of the seven CLIMAS tools which have been co-created within the project. The testing takes place in the CLIMAS living labs and three Climate Assemblies and the objective is to collect feedback for refinement and final validation of the tools. Below are the key learnings from the testing activities:

Catalan Climate Assembly – Testing the Methodological Guidelines for set-up and facilitation of CAs

• Using a dilemma approach throughout the whole assembly is helpful to keep citizens focused around discussing the trade-offs of the different options associated with the policy dilemmas.
• The content coordinator covers a critical role in the content provision phase to manage the information flow and ensure its reliability.
• The adoption of a balanced governance model ensures both political and technical autonomy.
• The facilitation process should ensure inclusivity.
• Communication and media cover a crucial role both internally and externally.

Riga Climate Assembly – Testing Citizen Science methods

• The activity was perceived as a valuable exercise from participants, facilitators, observers, and organisers.
• It helped explore, pay attention, monitor the nature, the species, and the environment.
• Group dynamics were enhanced as a result of the activity.

Edermünde Climate Assembly – Testing the Scenario-building Methodology

• There is a need to adopt a simplified version of the tool to shorten the duration.
• Three main phases are essential for creating scenarios: (i) identification of key drivers, (II) future scenario generation, and (iii) identification of evaluation criteria.

Questions and answers

After this presentation some time was dedicated to Advisory Board members’ questions. Here below we share a short summary of the main points addressed:

AB: Is the methodology scalable and suitable for a higher number of participants? Is there a limit to the participation?

CLIMAS: The Catalunya CA had 100 participants. The methodology has been tested in both small and large groups. So far, we haven’t seen an influence on the number of participants. There are some parts of the methodology that work better in smaller groups, but the tools can be easily scaled up. Nevertheless the methodology elements have been tested for the first time; we are planning to make some improvement. We keep refining the methodology as an ongoing process.

AB: What are the parameters for tools’ calibration?

CLIMAS: Calibration results from testing these tools in Living Labs and, whenever this has been possible, in Climate Assemblies. We involved different social groups, backgrounds, income, ethnicities, etc. Our ambition is that these tools can be applied in real Climate Assemblies beyond the CLIMAS project and that everyone can participate in their improvement. Any suggestion on how we could improve the calibration pocess to make the tools even more inclusive would be greatly appreciated.

The research team is still discussing how to measure impact in a Climate Assembly. There are different timeframes and opportunities to test the different tools are limited as well. It is challenging. Right now, we are reviewing the methodology to find key drivers on impact, mostly based on partners’ and practictioners’ experience. If Advisory Board members have further references in the scientific or grey literature, it could be  interesting to run comparisons. We are reviewing the KNOCA key driver, and a paper from NewDemocracy.

We are still in a learning process and we ask ourselves: Should we calibrate the trade-offs through the overall process? How does it differ during the learning phase and in the phase of recommendations? Do the recommendations achieve the goal of including the trade-offs? It would be important to verify how this core element of our methodology is working throughout the whole process and better calibrate it for broader adoption in the future.

AB – so far it seems that the calibration process presented is appropriate, especially if looking at the demographics and how participants had the possibility to evaluate the experience. Finally its closeness to policies. At ISWE for example they are developing metrics which correspond to (1) learning, (2) solidarity, and (3) action – and looking at these across all scales and actors, from community level to government institutions and not forgetting other actors in between (e.g. companies, religious institutions, NGOs, etc).

Q – What is the experience that Advisory Board members can bring here on citizen science methods as a tool for Climate Assemblies?

AB – It is indeed possible to integrate more Citizen Science in Climate Assemblies. It should be even more expanded, since it is not only for raising awareness, but it could provide evidence and data-driven sessions in the deliberation process, helping participants address or, even better, solve some of the dilemmas and trade-offs. There is a huge potential in Citizen Science and it is much more than participatory communication and awareness raising initiatives. Inviting Citizen Science projects in Climate Assemblies could help in the deliberation, bringing first-hand knowledge, tangible challenges and trade-offs. It’s better bringing information right there before their eyes (of Climate Assemblies participants, ndr), rather than providing it on long documents and reports.

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• 11:00 | The Case of the Catalan Climate Assembly
  

took part in the assembly sessions in five different cities across Catalonia. At the end of the Assembly, the attendance rate reached 83% and ended up with 48 recommendations on the two dilemmas: (i) deployment of energy infrastructures in the territory, and (ii) agri-food model. The assembly ended in February 2024, and we are now in the last stage, trying to ensure political accountability. An event will be organised where authorities will explain how they will implement the recommendations on public policy. Some aspects of the methodology:

• Agenda setting – It was difficult to define the dilemmas and trade-offs. Participants tended to avoid the trade-offs, and we needed to push participants -> One of the most important learning for us is to think how every activity of the assembly works for this purpose (constant driver throughout the whole process). We are now trying to involve experts in the agenda setting since from the beginning.
• Content provision – We worked with both internal and external experts and defined a deliberative curriculum:
  • Climate change
  • Government deliberative capacity
  • Possible solutions and trade-offs for the dilemmas

It is not clear the consensus around the trade-offs among different experts. We acknowledged that at least one of our dilemmas was too broad -> Learning: need to start working with the experts before and define the content and material for participants.

• Content provision – The content coordinator was a key figure. He helped us a lot to put in order all the information. We weren’t that successful in designing activities between participants and experts. Masterclass don’t work, debates worked much better. We are now working to define these activities more at horizontal level. There is huge room for improvement and Citizen Science could play a role. We are happy to hear any possible contribution.
• Democratic lottery process went smoothly. We stablished several scenarios to reach all profiles, combining different criteria and sending more invitation to those difficult to reach. We collaborated with the Catalan Institute of Statistics, and we reached people with different attitudes towards climate change.
• Facilitation and inclusivity – possible improvements could be done to work with all the facilitators and have more details about every activity and how it considers trade-offs. We need to find other ways to work with experts and citizens in the learning phase.
• Communication and media – we invested a lot, and we got attention at the beginning for the recruitment process and first meeting. Then we lost this attention, and we should do some more effort to keep this attention throughout all the process.
• Governance – we analysed several governance models and tried to establish a model for a technical team independent of the political representatives, but we were not successful in keeping the independence of the technical team during the whole process, as we had some interventions of the political groups. Involving political groups is a challenge as authorities are not willing to include political groups within the governance committee of the assembly. We are now designing the new governance model, so any input is greatly appreciated.

You can visit the Catalan Assembly page on our website with related articles and links HERE

Questions and answers

AB: What has been presented reflects our concerns when organising citizens panels. Generally, it is very important also the selection of experts as they can divert the discussion up to a certain point. It was interesting to see that you had experts that were not in agreement, and you could not reach consensus on the trade-offs. How did you push participants to reflect with the trade-offs?

CLIMAS: We already had a list of topics important to participants and we saw that the directions was towards the easy common ground, topics with low impact. Therefore, we categorised them according to the impact on climate change and the trade-offs and we asked them to prioritise those and to consider the trade-offs. Participants realised that it was difficult. For example, for the production and consumption of meat, the recommendation to have a healthy diet was not enough and they needed to consider the impact on the economic sectors. We realised we needed more time to address this point. The selection of experts is very important, we asked the Catalan Climate Change office for a balanced selection of experts covering the proposed dilemmas, so the decision was top-down.

AB: The selection mechanism could benefit from a digital engagement and broad participation of the population, towards higher “legitimization” of deliberation outputs. In Armenia, they put together an affiliation network composed of different organisations committed to take forward the recommendations, other than the government.

AB: In Belgium. Before the assembly was initiated, they brought together different journalists to establish contacts and realised that the journalists were not interested about the process itself, but rather on one assembly member transformation story, learnings, and relationship with the politicians.

CLIMAS: Maybe we should make the dilemmas public on the webpage beforehand, so everybody can have a word on them and at least we can engage with media in advance.

One of CLIMAS major conclusions is that the remit should point directly at the trade-offs and the trade-offs should connect with the leverage point, increasing the impact of the final recommendations. Usually there are no resources for extra agenda setting sessions, but with some additional budget it would be interesting to involve citizens in the agenda setting and see where the stakeholders do not agree.

On top of that, you need to define a dilemma which could have an impact according to the government capacities. Participatory processes usually take time, and you need to find a trade-off for their identification.

AB: You mentioned using Citizen Science because it’s more enjoyable. I would never use that term when talking about Citizen Science. Citizen Science projects involving diverse people represent a key arena to discuss controversial topics, such as air quality. Everyone has an opinion, so as a first step, we measure together air quality in different streets. This is also a way to have more horizontal relationships between the experts and the members of the Assembly.

CLIMAS: The idea was to be more effective and make knowledge closer to citizens, especially when they have different profiles and backgrounds. As an example in a preparatory meeting, we started with an open discussion to identify what could the cognitive biases of participants be and used our conclusions as the basis of the work with experts.

When talking about the CS, the discussion is focused on learnings. The idea of the toolkit is to potentially integrate Citizen Science in all the phases of a Climate Assembly. It can be used as an “instigator” of the topic that it will cover, from the learning phase up to the follow up phase of the assembly. It can be used to measure and verify the outcomes of the recommendations. Applying Citizen Science only in the learning phase is the simplest choice from an organisational perspective, but we shall not prevent it from being used in some or all other phases.

• 12:00 | The Case of the Riga Climate Assembly

Ingrida Strazdiņa from Green Liberty – Zaļā Brīvība explained that they are still busy running the Riga Citizen Assembly. It’s the 1^st Latvian Assembly, and it consists of 35 citizens from 17 to 75 years old, representing all the nationalities (only 43% of the participants are Latvian). Five sessions in total have been organised to work on recommendations for the Riga City Greening Plan 2027-2031. The team used several CLIMAS tools so far: setting up and facilitation, inclusive facilitation, Citizen Science, Monitoring and Evaluation tools. The topics addressed towards delivering the recommendations cover specific areas of the plan (e.g., biodiversity, rainwater, etc.). There is already a very high participation and commitment, with no drops-out so far. The deliberation phase will start shortly, and the final voting will happen in the next session.  The city council has already tried to allocate budget for the follow-up assembly of next year. The biggest challenge is that citizens and city council wanted to include too many aspects, expecting that one assembly can solve all the problems at once. We want to focus on the greening but there are always related topics raising (e.g., mobility).

Visit the Riga Assembly page on our website with related articles and links: https://www.climas-project.eu/co-creation-community/ca-riga/

12:10 |Interactive feedback session on CLIMAS platform and tools 

During this final session Aziz Rahman from TVS presented the CLIMAS Citizen Assembly Portal, bringing all the CLIMAS tools in one place, where both citizens and facilitators can access. In addition, there are other supporting tools that are required to perform the activities:

• Surveys
• Proposals
• Decision Making Tools – Multi Criteria Analysis and S-DPSIR
• Evaluation & Monitoring
• Guidelines – Citizen collaborative scenario building and Manual for setting up and facilitating climate assemblies

Juliàn Vicens from EURECAT explained how the tool they are developing provides guidance on how to integrate Citizen Science in Climate Assemblies, with a focus on climate adaptation. It includes 20 Citizen Science projects covering a range of different topics and gives examples of the activities that can be done in Climate Assemblies. The co-creation process and an early version of the toolkit are available on the following platform: https://decidim.eurecatprojects.com/processes/cstoolkit

The CLIMAS portal is not finalized yet: additional tools that will be added: Follow up, Agenda Setting, and Citizen Science.

Questions and answers

AB:  Is there any ambition to aggregate data all over Europe? How do you aggregate different processes and compare them in a uniform way?

CLIMAS: We did some background research, we have seen that different Climate Assemblies are using different online platforms not specifically developed for the purpose, such as cloud platforms, YouTube, or Citizen Science platforms. We can see what users use and if there is any open-source tool that has been used by Citizen Assemblies, we can implement it in the portal. TVS will keep the platform live and open to anyone.

• 12:30 | Wrap-up and final remarks, Deep Blue

The last session gave Advisory Board members tsome time to share their final observations related to the project advancement and preliminary results as well as to ask questions. Rebecca Hueting shared useful links, such as those linking to Climate Assemblies advancements, to the available tools and to the first CLIMAS official video: https://youtu.be/CEtk145U69g?si=G3_ZGD1AzARQ_mmR

Finally participants were invited to CLIMAS upcoming meetings:

• The first CLIMAS public event in Bologna, 28 May 2025
• Knowledge exchange workshops planned between February and September 2025
• Final Event towards the end of 2025 (TBD)

Here below a screenshot from the meeting

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