Climate advice can sound straightforward: stay cool during heatwaves, avoid exposed areas, seek shade, prepare for floods. But one question raised during the webinar captured a much harder reality:
“Who has the means to follow the advice?”
“Who has the means to follow the advice?”
On 15 October, the Horizon Europe sister projects Fair Future, JUST4CARE and Just Safe EU met for their first joint webinar, Just Climate Adaptation: Putting Vulnerable Communities First, to explore what climate resilience means when unequal housing, income, access to services and political voice shape people’s ability to respond to climate risks.
Across very different cities and methods, the three projects shared a common starting point: climate risk is not neutral. Heat, flooding and other impacts do not affect everyone in the same way, and adaptation measures cannot be considered fair simply because they improve environmental conditions.
The discussion therefore centred on three interconnected dimensions of climate justice: procedural justice, or who has a meaningful say in decisions; recognition justice, or whose experiences and knowledge are taken seriously; and distributive justice, or how the benefits and burdens of adaptation are shared.
Different approaches, similar questions
Fair Future, represented by Laia García from ICLEI Europe, presented its Resilient Action Labs, which bring together local actors, community-led initiatives and groups facing higher levels of climate exposure. From Hamburg and Thessaloniki to Zagreb and Bernouillet, the project is addressing challenges including extreme heat, flooding, air pollution and unequal access to green and cool spaces.
The discussion showed that participation needs different entry points. Existing community organisations may already have trust and relationships that a European project does not. Other people may require more flexible, targeted forms of engagement.
This question is also central to JUST4CARE.
Estibaliz Sanz and Jaione Ortiz de Zarate from BC3 presented how the project is working in Madrid, Zagreb, Budapest and Çankaya to connect climate evidence with local knowledge and existing support networks.
The methodology developed by GEA21 and first piloted in Madrid begins by building relationships with local organisations and mapping not only risks, but also resources, social connections and forms of care already present in a neighbourhood.
There is no single participation format. Depending on the context, the work may involve individual conversations, neighbourhood walks, school activities or community dinners. The aim is not simply to invite residents into a predefined process, but to understand what forms of participation are realistic, useful and legitimate in each place.
JUST4CARE is complementing this work with tools including the ARIES platform, which brings environmental and social information together with indicators related to adaptation measures that may generate harm; a planned Just Climate Resilience Atlas; and a Climate Justice Governance Assessment Tool for public administrations.
In Madrid, the Berruguete Climate Corridor was presented during the webinar as an example of a locally co-designed process now moving towards implementation. Further work is also developing in Józsefváros in Budapest, Çankaya and Zagreb.
Just Safe EU, meanwhile, showed how very different formats can help make climate information and participation more accessible. Its pilots are developing approaches including comics explaining heat stress, citizen science with students, a climate anxiety hub, serious games addressing climate misinformation and co-designed greening activities.
Participation is not automatically inclusive
Despite their different tools and locations, the three projects reported strikingly similar challenges.
Reaching people who are often absent from formal participation processes takes time. Trust cannot be created simply by introducing a new project. As one reflection during the session put it, a name such as “JUST4CARE” means little in itself to someone living in a neighbourhood.
Scientific language can also become a barrier. Municipal processes move at different speeds. Available data may not show inequalities at neighbourhood level. School calendars, administrative procedures and limited local resources all shape what can actually be implemented.
These are not secondary communication problems. They affect who can participate, whose knowledge enters a decision and which adaptation measures become possible.
The webinar therefore ended not with a list of solved problems, but with three questions that will continue to guide the exchange between the sister projects:
Who are we still missing in this conversation?
Who are the people we can actually influence?
How will we know that the lives of people most exposed to climate risks have improved?
For JUST4CARE, these questions are at the heart of climate adaptation as a matter of justice and care. Data and technical solutions matter, but they need to meet the knowledge held by communities, the capacity of public institutions and the conditions of everyday life.
The next webinars in the sister-project series will bring that conversation closer to the ground, giving individual pilots the floor to present their experiences, challenges and emerging learning directly.
Follow JUST4CARE, FairFuture Project and JustSafe EU for the next conversations in the series.