Anna Maria Kotrikla (p), Kyriaki Maria Fameli, Amalia Polydoropoulou, Floridea Di Ciommo, Azizur Rahman, Aelita Skaržauskienė, Monika Mačiulienė, Gintarė Gulevičiūtė

Matias Barberis Rami

CLIMAS is a project dedicated to fostering the transition to climate resilience. It aims to achieve this by providing an innovative, problem-oriented climate adaptation toolbox. This toolbox is co-designed with stakeholders, employing a value-based approach, design thinking methods, and citizen science mechanisms. The toolbox is intended to anticipate potential tensions, controversies, and dilemmas related to adaptation and resilience, thereby enabling empowerment and engagement strategies that lead to a society that is "resilient by design." Furthermore, CLIMAS incorporates an empirical component to test this toolbox and develop scientifically-based guidelines for policymakers. These guidelines aim to shift Climate Assemblies from technically-focused deliberations dominated by climate change experts to multi-stakeholder deliberations that prioritize solving dilemmas from a bottom-up, more societal, and value-based perspective. The outcomes of CLIMAS are expected to positively impact policy development and awareness-raising efforts, offering sustainable strategies to enhance policymakers' acceptance of citizen-led decisions. The CLIMAS toolbox comprises seven tools, including a citizen-collaborative future scenario building tool, a scenario prioritization tool, methodological guidelines for establishing and facilitating climate assemblies, and a citizen science tool to support deliberation processes. This paper explores the utility of these tools in supporting discussions within climate assemblies. It draws upon the experience gained from the co-creation, testing, calibration, and validation of the tools in the three living labs and three climate assemblies of the CLIMAS project. Climate assemblies and living labs are considered sustainable and effective tools for promoting deliberative democracy in climate policymaking.

Matias Barberis Rami (p)

Asimina Christoforou

The concept of resilience has gained increasing attention in response to the growing complexity of interrelated challenges and the impacts of various crises—whether disasters, economic downturns, migration waves, public health emergencies, or cyber threats. Societies need to develop the capacity to anticipate and prepare for these challenges by formulating strategies and implementing concrete policy actions to withstand shocks, remain flexible, and adapt to evolving and emerging threats.
In the policy domain, resilience serves as a catalyst for driving transformation in alignment with interconnected and broader policy objectives, such as cohesion policy, the Green Deal, and twin transitions. Policy experimentation provides an opportunity to enhance resilience by bringing together multiple stakeholders to develop solutions on a smaller scale, which can then be scaled up and out to benefit wider society.
The FutuResilience labs functioned as multi-stakeholder experimentation spaces, demonstrating how foresight and other policy-testing approaches—such as speculative design, science fiction narratives, and forecasting tools—can inform policymaking and strategic planning. These approaches enable proactive rather than reactive responses to societal issues, including healthcare systems, extreme weather events, access to housing, residential planning, public service provision, cybersecurity, and social integration.
This paper analyses the challenges and opportunities of policy experimentation as a core approach to building or strengthening societal resilience. This is achieved through a multidimensional analysis of the FutuResilience Labs ecosystem, complemented by global experiences in resilience-building. The analysis is based on content examination and includes insights from design processes and observations gathered during experimentation across several FutuResilience labs.

Asimina Christoforou (p), Eleni Gaki , Danai Toursoglou, Jenny Sykala

Anna Maria Kotrikla

In this paper, we discuss the study of the Chios Lab of the Futuresilience project, which focused on the migration influx of 2015 in Chios. The Chios Lab was led by the Municipality of Chios and the Regional Development Institute (RDI) of Panteion University. The aim of the study was to strengthen the governance of migration and build capacities for local resilience to deal with such phenomena in the future. For this purpose, the lab investigated the main factors affecting migration and developed scenarios and policies for dealing with such events by adopting an innovative participatory methodological approach, and by exploring synergies in a multi-level, multi-actor environment.

One of the main reasons for this study is the huge impact of the migration influx, which took place in the heart of the Greek economic crisis, and thus strained resources and created tensions within the local community, including concerns about integration, long-term housing, health, employment, economic impact, and social cohesion. According to the EU, from January 2015 till August 2016, more than one million people seeking international protection, predominantly from Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq, had entered Greece through Turkey.

The Chios Lab conducted workshops, focus groups, and interviews with multiple stakeholders, representing health, education, governance, the local labour and entrepreneurial institutions. Its study of migration first and foremost revealed that identifying challenges and building local resilience to migration require participatory and multi-stakeholder approaches, which give voice to all interested parties, activate local knowledge and dialogue, and enhance collaboration with regional, national and international actors in the private, public and social spheres. In this manner, we achieve more informed, effective, and just strategies and policies for resilience capacity building. The co-creation activities with local stakeholders brought to the fore the main factors related to the migration crisis, and led to policy actions for strengthening local resilience and the governance of migration in ways that can ensure decent work and living conditions for all community members, both locals and migrants, and can enhance social integration and mutual respect among diverse cultures.

Anna Maria Kotrikla (p), Kyriaki Maria Fameli, Amalia Polydoropoulou, Monika Mačiulienė, Gintarė Gulevičiūtė, Rūta Balkė, Aelita Skaržauskienė, Kristina Kovaitė, Carina Veeckman, Havva Ebrahimi Pour, Floridea Di Ciommo, Azizur Rahman

Charlotte Freudenberg

Future Scenario Building (FSB) is an essential method in foresight studies, particularly for addressing climate change. It enables the collaborative development of diverse, long-term visions of climate-resilient societies, which can support policy-making and social innovation. This paper presents the application of Future Scenario Building methodology within the Chios Living Lab to generated climate-related scenarios, highlighting factors that contributed to developing robust, grounded futures. Initially, the CLIMAS team created clear guidelines to support the use of the FSB methodology. These guidelines were then applied in two living labs—Chios and Vilnius—to build scenarios and identify areas for improvement. The process began with identifying key drivers, or influential factors affecting future outcomes. Various projections were developed for each driver and organized into a morphological box, from which consistent combinations were used to construct long-term (30-year) scenarios. The Chios lab focused on blending traditional and innovative approaches to climate adaptation, ecosystem health, and sustainable agriculture and tourism, considering both top-down policies and grassroots initiatives. Lessons learned emphasized the need for careful planning, inclusive participation, clarity of purpose, awareness of participant time limits, and efficient time management. Overall, the study highlights the value of structured, participatory scenario building in fostering climate resilience through informed, community-driven future planning.

Charlotte Freudenberg (p), Philine Warnke

Anna Maria Kotrikla

The FutuResilience project has developed innovative, science-based co-creation labs (“Future Resilience Labs”) to test policy-relevant research and innovation (R&I) findings that contribute to strengthening societal resilience and future preparedness in dealing with crises.
Through ten geographically distributed pilot cases across Europe, various stakeholders discussed and tested evidence-based strategies tailored to their specific contexts and local needs. The goal was to reduce vulnerabilities and enhance capacities to handle different types of crises. Supported by experienced foresight experts and equipped with a foresight toolbox, the ten pilot cases applied various participatory foresight methods, such as the scenario methodology, one of the most established and widely used foresight approaches.
Scenarios are coherent and plausible images of the future. They serve as mental models of alternative possible developments, enabling reflection on future opportunities and risks and supporting robust strategy building and decision-making in the present.
Foresight, in its broadest sense, is a systematic futures dialogue among stakeholders with diverse perspectives. It helps actors to explore, anticipate, and shape the future, allowing the structured and systemic use of collective intelligence.
Foresight acknowledges the inherent uncertainty of short- to long-term future developments and facilitates reflection on various possible future trajectories. By integrating multiple perspectives and methodologies, it fosters creative and long-term thinking beyond conventional forecasts and linear extrapolations.
Foresight dialogues provide both product and process benefits. They generate distributed anticipatory intelligence, offering insights into potential threats, opportunities, and options for action, which support future-oriented and resilient decision-making.
Moreover, the interactive dialogue strengthens a system’s ability to adapt to a changing environment and unlock its full potential by fostering connections and shared understanding among diverse actors and domains.

Foresight activities are a key element of capacity building in the context of resilience. They enable stakeholders not only to observe their environment more effectively but also to detect changes at an early stage.
Most importantly, foresight mobilises the necessary capacities across different system domains, particularly within innovation systems.

The session will present and discuss the participatory foresight methods used in the FutuResilience Labs and explore how these approaches contribute to testing policy-relevant R&I findings for the resilience and future preparedness of the EU.