AGORA promotes societal transformation to empower local communities to address the climate crisis. AGORA aims to achieve this through a multidisciplinary, integrated approach and four pilot studies all around Europe.
AGORA is a growing, dynamic, pan-European community that creates and shares advanced digital tools to enhance awareness. Informed citizens can actively participate and contribute to ensure safe and sustainable development.
AGORA is defined as the meeting point where citizens share knowledge, practices, expertise and needs, interacting with sciences to design and build a more resilient Europe through a living dialogue between local communities.
AGORA is a HORIZON Europe project started in January 2023. It supports the EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change.
4 digital tools are the heart of the AGORA project.
They provide the general public with an open space that supports the growth of a wide community of informed and aware citizens.
Agora Community Hub
The Agora Community Hub is the living digital environment that enables stakeholders, scientists, experts, media and citizens to network and communicate, facilitating them to find peers and other communities from other geographical or societal contexts to share challenges and needs. It is the entry point to access all the digital tools developed by the project.
JOIN AGORA COMMUNITY HUBDigital Academies
AGORA provides two “Digital Academies” to support citizens and stakeholders to access open-source climate data for adaptation and tackle climate change disinformation.The first academy will not only provide access to data but also support users with guidelines on how to read, interpret and effectively use the information. The second will help stakehold-ers to identify and address the main fake news related to climate change and provide them with tools to tackle disinformation.
AGORA MOBILE APP
The gamified mobile app aims to support the education of citizens on climate change ad-aptation and counter disinformation campaigns through an entertaining and engaging approach. Through an interactive educational experience, the app will increase the engagement of citizens.
DIGITAL HANDBOOK
The Digital Handbook is an interactive multimedia platform that gathers a collection of the lessons learned by project. It is intended to be the final product of a knowledge integration process through a dynamic and user-friendly navigation system.
The German Pilot
The German Pilot collaborates with various stakeholders in the city of Dresden, including the city council, academia, the private sector, and civil society organisations, as well as neighboring rural regions. The city’s upcoming climate adaptation strategy will be used as a starting point to identify, together with local stakeholders from diverse sectors, the drivers of vulnerability risks and the local gaps in their adaptive capacity. Dresden is one of the greenest cities in Europe, and its people have been trying for centuries to preserve the richness of this natural environment. Nonetheless, the effects of climate change in the urban area of Dresden can already be observed today and will continue to increase in the future. These include increase of forest fires, increase of heavy rains and flooding as well as summer droughts (with serious effects on the water balance as well as on agriculture and forestry), and heat stress, among others. Therefore, the primary focus of this Pilot lies in bolstering resilience against recurrent heavy rains leading to significant flooding and the emergence of heat waves.
The Italian Pilot
The Italian Pilot focuses on the city of Rome, the national capital and the largest city in Italy. In relation to climate change impacts, AGORA supported the definition of the Adaptation Strategy to climate change that identify priorities, objectives, and measures to prepare the city for the increasingly frequent and intense impacts due to ongoing climate change. The strategy was approved by the Rome administration on 19 January 2024, and now begins its public consultation phase with the aim of involving citizens and stakeholders in a discussion to increase widespread information and awareness on climate change. In the Italian pilot, among the various climate risks, both those related to direct impacts (e.g., heat waves, urban flooding, etc.) and those related to indirect impacts (e.g., drought) are considered. This is to determine the climate impacts, the related vulnerabilities, and risks as well as the possible adaptation options, not only by considering the perspective of decision-makers (top-down approach) but also by integrating the civil society and local users (bottom-up approach) from the initial process of defining vulnerabilities and risks.
The Spanish Pilot
The Spanish Pilot collaborates with the Government of Aragón and actively engages representatives from public authorities, academia, civil society, and the private sector. The pilot involves two specific sites: (1) Zaragoza, the region's central city, which serves as home to people from across Aragón and a meeting point for relevant discussions about climate adaptation, primarily concerning heatwaves and flooding in the area; and (2) Matarrañas, a rural area in the southeast part of the region with forests highly vulnerable to fires, which will allow us to address the rural perspective and the urgent need to protect natural resources within the region of Aragón.
The Swedish Pilot
The Swedish Pilot collaborate with the City of Malmö. The case study engages a range of stakeholders including civil society, academia, private sector and non-profit organisations. The focus is on heatwaves and its effects on vulnerable groups in the city. The pilot explores questions like: Who is affected during a heat wave, and in what way? How can their vulnerability be reduced? With this knowledge, we can better understand how City of Malmö as a municipality can work to facilitate for citizens to deal with extreme heat and at the same time create a more equitable and just adaptation to climate change. In the next months, thanks to the pilot activities, the participants will be able to co-evaluate innovative engagement methods and co-create local adaptation solutions.
AGORA will also develop a roadmap for transformational change and upscale of citizen engagement, for transferability of effective policy instruments and for ensuring long term legacy.
Our Followers
Other regions as well as associations, organizations and institutions that are involved in the process of adaptation to climate change can join the project as followers. This opportunity enlarges the AGORA community beyond the 4 pilot areas, involving a greater number of people and supporting the whole adaptation process in Europe. The followers can share with AGORA their specific needs and requests and benefit from the results of the project coming from the pilot areas.
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