Blood, sweat and adaptation

The tale of climate change is now at the messy stage of dealing with its growing consequences says Ananya Tiwari. The time for unread reports is done.

Most climate stories still tell how, with enough investment, the world can decarbonise in time. Across Europe, people are already living with the consequences of a changing climate: flooded homes, eroding beaches, failing crops, sleepless heatwave nights and the realisation that the risks are no longer abstract. Mitigation is still needed, but the need to adapt is now with us.

Adaptation is where climate policy becomes local, social and messy. Mitigation can be sold as a technology transition. Adaptation is more often a negotiation over land, money, evidence, power and responsibility. It asks awkward questions: who is exposed, who is protected, who pays, who decides and whose knowledge counts? It is preventative, not obviously profitable, and its benefits often appear as disasters that did not happen.

My work in European climate adaptation projects has taken me into this messiness. I worked on SCORE, an EU-funded project supporting coastal cities and regions to adapt to sea-level rise and coastal hazards. The wider EU Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change has put substantial money behind this agenda. Rather than waiting for national governments to produce perfect long-term plans, EU funding has often flowed through universities and municipalities to create practical spaces for action.

These spaces are often called living labs. The phrase can sound technical, but the idea is simple: bring affected people into the same room as those with formal powers, scientific expertise and resources, then test solutions in real places. This is not consultation where citizens are told what has already been decided, but collaboration where they can help co-design solutions. At its best, living labs creates a civic space where local knowledge, scientific data and authority can meet, and avoid maladaptation. (see box: What living labs add).

That matters because formal governance is often fragmented. A municipality may understand the risk but lack money or jurisdiction. Residents may see the damage first but lack legal power or technical expertise. Scientists may have satellite data, sensors and future projections, but no route into decisions. Landowners or businesses may control critical assets but feel little urgency if they are not exposed. Living labs do not remove these conflicts, but they can make them visible and negotiable.

Evidence mattered, but so did the process that made it usable.

In County Sligo, Ireland, residents worried about coastal erosion and storm damage faced this kind of blockage. The dunes that protected their homes were privately owned, invaded by sea buckthorn and losing their protective function. Local people had begun meeting, but lacked jurisdiction and scientific support. The living lab created a platform where residents, the municipality, the landowner and researchers could discuss dune management as a shared problem (see box: Sligo, Ireland – dunes, ownership and coastal protection.)

The lesson from Sligo is not that dialogue is enough. It is that adaptation often needs convening power. Once the issue was brought into a shared space, researchers could analyse historic erosion, model future risk and compare nature-based dune management with harder engineering such as rock armour. Evidence mattered, but so did the process that made it usable.

A second lesson is justice. In the Basque Country, interviews showed that women, migrants, low-income households, older people and other vulnerable groups were often more exposed to climate risks and less able to respond. Yet many people were willing to act. They were worried about the future, including their children’s future, but often did not know what action was possible or who would support them. People often believe in climate change and are concerned about it, but they just don’t know how to act to do anything about it (see box Basque Country, Spain – vulnerability and willingness to act).

When people work on tangible local risks, climate change becomes less of a distant catastrophe and more of a shared public task.

This is where adaptation can strengthen mitigation rather than distract from it. When people work on tangible local risks, climate change becomes less of a distant catastrophe and more of a shared public task. The point is not to terrify people with worst-case projections. We used satellite and sensor data to understand historic trends and future scenarios, but workshops often began with immediate problems: flooding, erosion, heat, water security. The future was present in the pattern people could already see: worsening storms, deeper droughts, harder summers.

The third lesson is that implementation depends on institutions and finance, not just enthusiasm. In Samsun, Turkey, stakeholders co-designed nature-based solutions for the Kizilirmak Delta, exposed to flooding, erosion and saltwater intrusion. The workshop surfaced practical conflicts: a flood solution may affect tourism; lower river flows may damage fisheries; land for restoration may be contested. But even well-designed solutions face familiar barriers: short political cycles, constrained municipal budgets, uncertain maintenance and reliance on temporary project funding (see box (Samsun, Turkey – co-design under real constraints).

Collaborative governance is not a soft add-on to technical climate policy. It is part of the infrastructure of resilience.

This exposes the central contradiction of adaptation. The risks are long term, but funding and politics are short term. Municipal officers may want to plan for the future, but elected administrations need visible benefits within a few years. National funding often rewards capital projects more readily than patient maintenance. Research projects can fund sensors, workshops and demonstrations, but they rarely last forever. The structures they create need to outlive the grant.

That is why collaborative governance is not a soft add-on to technical climate policy. It is part of the infrastructure of resilience. Sensors, models and nature-based solutions are vital, but so are the relationships and rules that make them usable. Collaborative governance models including participatory budgeting, citizen assemblies, climate pacts and living labs all point in the same direction: cities and regions need ways to connect scientific knowledge with lived experience and authority.

The broader implication is a challenge to academia. Too much research still ends with a publication few practitioners read. Adaptation requires a more active role: not academics as distant evaluators of what has already happened, but as partners in co-producing knowledge that communities and municipalities can use. EU adaptation programmes show what happens when research funding becomes a channel for local experimentation.

None of this is neat. Adaptation will always be particular to place. It will involve disputes over land, uneven exposure to risk, incomplete data, uncertain ecosystems and hard choices about public money. But that is precisely why participatory governance matters. Climate resilience will not be built only by experts producing plans, nor by communities being asked to adapt alone. It will be built in the difficult middle ground, where people with different powers and knowledge are given a reason, and a place, to work together. This is what I aim to do through my work.

To learn more about my research, check out my website at https://ananyatiwari.eu/