Proactive community adaptation to climate change through social transformation and behavioural change

Proactive community adaptation to climate change through social transformation and behavioural change

The strategic objective of PRO-CLIMATE is to support communities to proactively adapt to climate change through social transformation and behavioural change. To achieve this, PRO-CLIMATE will identify social tipping points and policy actions that enable systemic transformation to be achieved across social systems. PRO-CLIMATE will adopt an approach guided by the concept of systems thinking, which views communities as complex systems that are interconnected and influenced by multiple factors, socio-economic and environmental. By understanding and leveraging their dynamics, it will then develop strategies and interventions that promote social transformation and behavioural change. This will result in a robust framework for designing effective methodologies and tools to foster proactively adaptive behaviours and facilitate transformative changes. A set of diverse (in terms of climate change problems and socio-economic contexts) case studies across Europe will be an instrumental tool for the co-creation, validation, and upscaling of this framework by running living labs and bringing stakeholders together to understand community governance and institutional structures, and to also pilot and validate the project's behaviour change activities. The outputs of PRO-CLIMATE will include: a) the identification of key components of climate adaptation systems, their interactions, systemic interdependencies and trade-offs, b) the design, implementation, and evaluation of a living lab framework, c) the identification of social tipping points and leverage actions for policy makers, d) the development of a multi agent computer model for European socio-ecological systems to allow a realistic analysis of existing and future policy scenarios likely to produce systemic transformations, and e) policy recommendations to accelerate systemic change.