Project Portugal 2030

Summary

Efforts to address the climate crisis have been revealed as insufficient, with increasing risks posed by extreme weather events, particularly for the most vulnerable groups. Urgent transformative climate action is required to address this main challenge, which involves developing strategies to adapt or transform spaces to minimise risks. Some cities have identified climate shelter spaces within their public spaces network to provide protection against severe weather events, particularly heatwaves. ClimSHELL aims to explore how these climate shelters should be identified and planned, understood as public arenas (solidarity epicenters) for the exchange of experiences and practices. They should strengthen community resilience by building on people's capacities. Three main objectives (O) can be identified to address the challenges (C). O1 – Develop an innovative methodology (C-SHELL) for designing a system of climate shelters (CSS), able to define a CSS, create a monitoring system to assess its effectiveness, and integrate collaborative approaches. It will allow the replication in other contexts/cities. C1 – Decision-makers and the community need to understand the benefits and costs of adaptation strategies. Understanding the quantification of benefits can be challenging. O2 - Define/create a climate shelter system (CSS), tackling various climate risks and ensuring a comprehensive distribution throughout the city to guarantee climate justice. C2 - Develop and implement strategies to adapt/transform urban spaces, promoting justice among the population, and attending to the most vulnerable groups of the community. O3 – Consider shelters as spaces of encounters and collective learning, where individuals can interact and exchange memories and experiences, and where they can learn about best practices to individually or collectively better adapt to climate change, reinforcing community resilience. C3 – Regarding climate change, individuals still appear apathetic towards taking significant action. Additional research and action are required to improve current communication methods and approaches. Capacity building is crucial for effective climate adaptation. The project relies on three novel aspects. First, the new conceptual perspective crossing emerging concepts – ‘climate shelters’ and ‘community resilience’; second, the capacity-building approach that goes beyond the merely risk-based approach in defining the shelters’ system; and third, the collaborative process to explore narratives and storytelling, diving into the community’s experience of the past and present, their collective wisdom and sociocultural capital, through intergenerational and intercultural approach. This will facilitate the envisioning of alternative futures and promote mechanisms for enhancing the capacity for effective climate change-related actions within the community. It will create a continuous and interactive system that combines digital technologies with collaborative workshops. The spatialisation of narratives using participatory mapping is crucial for understanding site-specific conditions, constituting novelty in the literature. These novel aspects converge in C-SHELL, an innovative methodology (that will be patented) that can effectively respond to the need for creating CSS to provide refuge in climate crisis. The innovative aspect also pertains to the Portuguese context where these concerns are just emerging, as is the case of the municipality of Matosinhos.