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Poster Short Abstract

This contribution presents a framework for climate risk assessment that combines climatic data for hazard characterization with qualitative data based on stakeholders’ participation to assess vulnerability and response capacity. This participatory methodology will be tested across diverse contexts.

Poster Abstract

The impacts of climate change are expected to further increase in the future and, as widely recognized, their effects will not be equally distributed among the population. For this reason, climate risk assessment is considered a crucial tool for implementing effective and tailored adaptation strategies. While various methodologies exist for assessing climate risks, particularly those based on the hazard’s characterization, novel approaches that integrate diverse forms of knowledge beyond quantitative data remain still limited. Nevertheless, an extensive body of literature in climate research has already recognized a range of benefits associated with stakeholders’ participation, such as overcoming knowledge barriers, increasing trust and transparency in the process, enhancing social acceptability of measures proposed.

Within this framework, we aim to more effectively integrate stakeholders’ knowledge into the assessment of key risk components, as defined in the Sixth Assessment Report of the IPCC (2023), namely vulnerability and response capacity. By doing so, our research proposes both theoretical and empirical contributions to participatory climate risk assessment domain, highlighting how more inclusive processes can improve the robustness and relevance of the results obtained. Specifically, this contribution will present the preliminary results of a novel step-by-step framework that successfully integrates climate information with qualitative data, derived from the active participation of stakeholders, throughout the entire risk assessment process. Finally, the proposed framework will be tested in diverse geographical contexts including rural, urban, coastal and mountain areas within the implementation of three EU-funded research projects, demonstrating its applicability across different environments.