Advancing climate adaptation through citizen engagement: knowledge development, sharing, and implementation in Europe

Climate action requires urgent public policy decisions to be made at increasingly local scales. Meanwhile, decades of experience in social and environmental issues have yielded much knowledge of what works (and what does not) to achieve effective citizen engagement in different contexts. In recent years, these two trends (climate action and citizen engagement) have increasingly intertwined, yet, until now, little work has explored how knowledge at this interface is developed, shared and implemented. Failing to understand this cycle of learning risks slowing the upscaling of truly effective citizen engagement in climate action and repeating avoidable mistakes that create barriers for democratic climate action. This article outlines recent advances at each stage of this cycle related to engaging citizens in climate adaptation action. Blending desk-based analysis, interviews and online workshops, we trace the rapid pace of recent climate knowledge development, outline the increasing number and sophistication of climate knowledge-sharing platforms, and identify the implementation of this knowledge in 61 European climate adaptation action initiatives. We observe a positive trend in the integration of citizen engagement in climate adaptation, yet find that the implementation of good practices is hindered by several factors. These include: knowledge development primarily relying on academic sources; limited transparency of whether knowledge-sharing platforms are up to date; challenges with tailoring general knowledge to individual and local contexts; institutional barriers; and a lack of societal normalisation of citizen engagement. For each stage of the learning cycle, we present suggestions for overcoming these challenges.