Adaptive Multimodal Systems to Support Coordination and Decision-making in Inter- and Intra-municipal Climate Change Adaptation (VeloCityAdapt)

Climate adaptation happens on the ground and under pressure: local authorities must plan for extreme heat, weather events, flooding and more, requiring complex coordination, data collection, and specialist expertise. The BMFTR flagship programme "Accelerating climate adaptation planning with urban digital twins" addresses this need by developing solutions for robust decision-making and improved planning processes.

As a part of this programme, the project "VeloCityAdapt - Adaptive Multimodal Systems to Support Coordination and Decision-making in Inter- and Intra-municipal Climate Change Adaptation” will develop tools to support city managers and municipal teams in their coordination, decision-making and participation efforts at both the local and inter-municipal levels.

What specific challenges does VeloCityAdapt address?

VeloCityAdapt tackles three key obstacles:

• Lack of resources: there is a lack of qualified expertise, particularly in the field of geoinformatics
• Complex coordination processes: Cooperation and communication between different municipalities, government departments and agencies is often time-consuming and leads to delays.
• Self-Reliance: Actors are often unaware of potential impacts, measures and funding opportunities, resulting in under-utilization of resources.

In addition, implementation and training costs are frequently obstacles for smaller or rural municipalities.

How VeloCityAdapt tackles these challenges in practice

To mitigate the lack of resources, VeloCityAdapt is developing user-friendly tools that integrate into existing processes, enabling local authorities to perform robust analyses and comparisons of variants without requiring large teams of experts. These tools will facilitate information sharing among local authorities, agencies, neighbouring municipalities, and partners, ensuring all stakeholders have a common understanding of planning updates, assumptions, and impact assessments. The tools will visualize and communicate measures and their impacts clearly, fostering acceptance and self-reliance by enabling citizens and stakeholders to understand proposed plans, alternative options, and associated benefits and trade-offs. Simultaneously, VeloCityAdapt ensures solutions are transferable and economically feasible by utilizing modular components that can be introduced step-by-step, minimizing implementation, training, and operating costs.

The project outputs

VeloCityAdapt is developing a socio-technical infrastructure to support municipal planning processes, including user-friendly applications that are accessible even without in-depth IT knowledge, and clear 3D visualizations of planning options that facilitate understanding and participation. This will expedite coordination, streamline cooperation and enable citizens to better understand the rationale behind specific planning options and decisions.

Our role in VeloCityAdapt: Real-world laboratory and participation research, developing formats, testing impacts

In the VeloCityAdapt project, RIFS contributes its expertise in governance analysis as well as participation and transformation research, with the goal of ensuring that technical solutions perform as intended and are widely adopted in practice. RIFS will collect and systematically evaluate international best practices for participation, analyse local planning and participation contexts in Bad Berleburg and Hagen (stakeholder network analyses), and engage with stakeholder groups through interviews, workshops and focus groups.

RIFS researchers are also responsible for developing and implementing interactive collaboration formats to test and iteratively improve planning options with stakeholders from local authorities and communities. This work will be complemented by outputs addressing various ethical, legal, and social considerations.