Urban adaptation to climate change: Climate services for supporting collaborative planning

There is a mounting international interest about how to address the implications of climate change for urban areas. The availability and sharing of “good” knowledge and information is a key prerequisite for a successful planning in cities. Urban planning for adaptation is largely considered as a collective process. This raises the importance of the availability/usability of proper “planner/user friendly” interfaces to interpret and translate the available information into adaptation decisions, and to facilitate the information sharing and collaborative decision making within the interaction network in which the different actors are embedded. Nevertheless, collaborative planning is far from being the standard in urban adaptation. The activities carried out in EU-MACS aimed at detecting and analysing the main barriers hampering the process. To this aim, Problem Structuring Methods and Social Network Analysis were implemented. The evidences collected in an urban case study – i.e. Helsinki – demonstrated that ambiguity in problem understanding and information needs, and missing connections in the mechanisms of interaction among actors-resources-tasks could hamper the effectiveness of collaborative planning and create inefficient flow between information production and decision process. Starting from these premises, and referring to the results of an extensive literature review about existing tools, our research aimed at facilitating the use of climate services to enable the collective decision-making process.