Bottom-Up Resilience: A Living Lab Approach to Strengthen Ecosystem Services and Climate Resilience with Local Communities

Bottom-up approaches to climate resilience are increasingly promoted, yet there remains a gap in understanding how science-society connections can be operationalized in everyday contexts to support adaptive land-use practices, particularly in small towns and peripheral regions. This paper addresses this gap by examining how Living Labs (LLs) can function as process-oriented interfaces between scientific knowledge, local experience, and participatory negotiation, rather than as instruments for producing novel biophysical and social-learning insights. Drawing on selected case studies from the Biodiversity Hub and the Department for Building and Environment at the University for Continuing Education Krems (Austria), the study applies a qualitative, transdisciplinary Living Lab approach combining regular shared site walks, emotional communication, and cross-sectoral ecosystem services assessment matrices (aligned with established classifications and quantitative data collection). Resilience is grounded in the literature as a social–ecological capacity for adaptation and transformation and is operationalized pragmatically as the strengthening of connectedness between people, place, and ecological processes. The key findings show that short, place-based, and experiential interactions—such as shared walks and co-creative ecosystem service assessments—can lower participation barriers, mitigate power asymmetries, and enable rapid integration of scientific perspectives into everyday land-use decision-making. Rather than producing directly replicable outcomes, Living Labs generate transferable process principles, including emotional correspondence, structured negotiation, and the use of simple boundary tools to support collective learning and action. The paper contributes to resilience and land-system research by demonstrating how Living Labs can enhance local adaptive capacity and climate resilience through process design, immediate feedback, and continuous experimentation. It thereby complements conventional, indicator-driven assessments by illustrating how resilience can be enacted through participatory, place-based governance practices, offering practical guidance for municipalities and regions facing climate-related risks such as heat stress, drought, soil degradation, biodiversity loss, and increasing pressures on the secure provision of food, materials, and drinking water.