Climate change and urban development patterns amplify the risks of flooding and water pollution. While climate-robust stormwater management has the potential to reduce these risks, its implementation remains slow. Enhanced and new forms of collaboration between municipalities and property owners are proposed as the keys to advancing the volume and effectiveness of such measures. However, the practical outline of new collaborative practices between these actor categories within existing built urban environments is still in its early stages. This study uses the experiences and visions of respondents from eleven municipalities and six property companies in Sweden to start examining the challenges, needs, and requirements for such forms of collaboration. The study identifies current challenges, including ambiguous legislation, organizational differences, unclear roles and responsibilities, and weak economic incentives. Requirements for improved collaboration opportunities include overcoming perceived legal obstacles, assigning collaboration coordinators, establishing long-term collaborative forums, and clarifying financial principles and cost-sharing arrangements. Creating the conditions for collaboration thus requires changes in formal national frameworks, as well as changes in local organizational structures, norms, and traditions.

Climate-related risks, vulnerabilities, and impacts are increasing in cities, illustrated by precipitation-driven pluvial floods. Post-event analyses can aid in reducing urban flood risks, but knowledge gaps exist regarding how welfare services and premises are impacted and can be adapted. This study analyses an extreme precipitation-driven event generating extensive flooding in Gavle, Sweden, in 2021. The objective is to increase knowledge about how municipal welfare services are vulnerable to pluvial floods, and of appropriate actions towards improving the response capacity and building more resilient welfare premises and operations. The study shows that the Swedish weather warning system generally worked well, but the analysed property companies lacked strategies and equipment to evade flooding in their properties. Flood damages in 60 analysed buildings were generated by different causes, demonstrating the importance of contemplating the vulnerability of welfare buildings when conducting flood risk assessments. Although the flood event did not generate deaths or serious personal injuries, the study identified impacts on welfare service operations in both the short and long terms. The event increased learning on climate adaptation but did not trigger adaptive action. Identified keys for adaptation include prioritizing premises to protect, knowledge of flood protection equipment, insurance company requirements, and updated emergency plans.

Klimatförändringar leder till ökade och nya risker i samhällen. Översvämningar från skyfall är en sådan risk som redan genererar stora skador, vilka förväntas öka markant i framtiden. Inte minst riskerar många villaägare att drabbas av översvämningar och de har också tillskrivits en central roll i Sveriges klimatanpassningsarbete. Trots detta har inga tidigare svenska studier undersökt specifikt hur villaägare påverkats av översvämningar bortom skadekostnader och ytterst få har undersökt hur de har hanterat eller ser på sitt ansvar att förebygga översvämningsrisker. Bristen på sådan kunskap kan leda till mindre informerade beslut om klimatanpassning. Genom intervjuer med villaägare som drabbats av översvämningar undersöker denna studie hur villaägare; ser på översvämningsrisker, har påverkats materiellt och hälsomässigt, har hanterat situationen, och ser på ansvar att förebygga nya skador. Studien påvisar tydliga effekter på villaägares välbefinnande, att få villaägare har implementerat åtgärder, tendenser att underskatta risker för översvämningar samt att ansvaret för förebyggande åtgärder skjuts över till andra aktörer.

The need to develop sustainable stormwater management is intensifying due to climate impacts and urban densification. Such complex planning processes require insights into disparate issues, connecting heterogeneous actors. While many decision-support tools are developed to facilitate such planning, research assessing their usefulness is requested. This study introduces and assesses one such ICT-tool; the Visual Water platform, aiming to support sustainable stormwater planning in Swedish municipalities. The study aims to identify critical points to consider for developers of related decision-support tools and to detangle requirements and tradeoffs in making them relevant and user-friendly, building on test-sessions with Swedish practitioners. Results show that the platform responds to challenges within municipal planning as outlined by Swedish practitioners. However, though the platform content is considered relevant, its application in real-world planning is perceived as somewhat unclear. The paper discusses ideas for how sustainability-related decision-support tools better can respond to user demands.

Transformative adaptation is described as decisive to mitigating risks and to seizing opportunities from a changing climate, requiring new ways of governing, planning and collaborating, alongside technical innovations. Building municipal capacities for citizen participation in adaptation is important to enabling such transformational changes but remains challenging. By applying capacities distilled from the literature on Urban Transformative Capacity and Participatory Climate Governance in a Swedish municipal case, this study aims to disentangle key limits for, and innovations to strengthen, local capacities for citizen participation in transformative climate adaptation. Interviews with municipal officials, focus groups with citizens, and document analyses were employed to analyse how climate adaptation and citizen participation are governed, and how these policy areas are interacting and could be bridged. The study points at conditions that foremost prevent bridging established policies and practices on adaptation and citizen participation, stemming from the different logics and distribution of responsibility within, and lacking collaboration between, these separated policy areas. The analysis concludes that potential ways to enable citizen participation in adaptation involve: broadening the geographical boundaries of deliberations; redefining the target groups for participation; co-designing participation targets, approaches and evaluation; and developing new ways to analyse and act on the patterns in the citizen inputs received.

Visual Water (http//visualwater.se) är en interaktiv webbaserad visualiseringsplattform som syftar till att stötta svenska kommuner i arbetet för en hållbar dagvatten- och skyfallshantering. Plattformen är utformad för att svara mot centrala utmaningar som lyfts av svenska dagvattenaktörer som befinner sig i skiftet bort från de rörbundna nätverksidealen för avledning av dagvatten och strävar efter en högre grad av grön-blå och öppna lösningar i stadsmiljön.

Visual Water (http//visualwater.se) is an interactive web-based platform for geographic and information visualization aiming to support Swedish municipalities working towards sustainable stormwater management. The content and functionalities of the platform are designed to respond to central challenges as they are defined by actors in the Swedish stormwater sector who find themselves in the shift away from underground pipe-bound solutions towards blue-green measures in the urban environment.

Climate change and urban densification pose major challenges to the built environment. In Swedish cities, fluvial and pluvial floods risk being aggravated, necessitating adaptation efforts to make the build environment more resilient. A recent governmental inquirystates that owners are primarily responsible for adapting their property, and that the existing built environment is particularly tricky. Property owners often lack tools and approaches to strategically adapt to climate risks. This paper presents and tests a structured approach intended for large property owners to assess and visualize flood vulnerability in both individual buildings and the property portfolio, and organizational adaptive responses. The approach was developed and tested using the municipal housing company Hyresbostäder in Norrköping, Sweden as case. The study builds on workshops with staff, a systematic flood vulnerability mapping of 575 buildings, and in-situ inspections of the 85 most vulnerable buildings. The vulnerability and need for adaptation of individual buildings were visualized on a map, and adaptive avenues were identified. The approach was found useful for identifying the most vulnerable buildings, concrete adaptation measures and five broad adaptation avenues: riskfocused adaptation investments, area-focused adaptation, regular inspection and maintenance, informed collaboration and tenant dialogues. The property owner’s transformative capacity was improved by creating a shared vision, empowerment and learning, innovation capacity, gaining overview supporting transformative leadership and external cooperation likely to contribute to meeting SDGs 13 and 11. In further studies the approach will be tested by other large property owners under limited research support.

Background. Serious games are gaining increasing prominence in environmental communication research, but their potential to form an integrated part of participatory research approaches is still strikingly understudied. This is particularly the case for applications of interactive digital formats in research on environmental challenges of high complexity, such as climate adaptation, which is a specifically suitable case as it involves complex interaction between climate systems and society, but where the response also involves trade-offs with potentially negative – maladaptive – outcomes.

Intervention. This article presents the Maladaptation Game, which was designed to facilitate dialogue about potential negative outcomes of agricultural climate adaptation.

Methods. We conducted test sessions with agricultural stakeholders in Finland and Sweden, and analysed quantitative and qualitative, audio-recorded and transcribed, material for opportunities and challenges related to dialogues, engagement, interactivity and experienced relevance.

Results. The qualitative analysis of recorded dialogues shows that the Maladaptation Game has potential to support dialogue by challenging players to negotiate between options with negative outcomes. The gameplay itself presents opportunities in terms of creating engagement with options that provoke disagreement and debates between players, as well as interactivity, that players reflected upon as quick and easy, while challenges were related to the experienced relevance, in particular the options provided in the game, and its general framing.

Conclusions. The results indicate a need for complementary approaches to this type of game but also suggest the importance of moderation when the game design is aimed at creating dialogue around a complex environmental challenge such as agricultural climate adaptation.

Transforming cities into low-carbon, resilient, and sustainable places will require action encompassing most segments of society. However, local governments struggle to overview and assess all ongoing climate activities in a city, constraining well-informed decision-making and transformative capacity. This paper proposes and tests an assessment framework developed to visualize the implementation of urban climate transition (UCT). Integrating key transition activities and process progression, the framework was applied to three Swedish cities. Climate coordinators and municipal councillors evaluated the visual UCT representations. Results indicate that their understanding of UCT actions and implementation bottlenecks became clearer, making transition more governable. To facilitate UCT, involving external actors and shifting priorities between areas were found to be key. The visual UCT representations improved system awareness and memory, building local transformative capacity. The study recommends systematic assessment and visualization of process progression as a promising method to facilitate UCT governance, but potentially also broader sustainability transitions.

Agriculture is often described as one of the sectors most vulnerable to future climate change, and its vulnerability is commonly assessed through quantitative indices. However, such indices differ significantly depending on their selected indicators, weighting mechanisms, and summarizing methods, often leading to divergent assessments of vulnerability for the same geographic area. The use of generic indicators might also lead to a loss of information about contextual risks and vulnerabilities. This may reduce the perceived usefulness of indices among stakeholders.

This study analyses the role of indicators in assessing agricultural vulnerability to climate change. It analyses how indices are understood and used through three separate focus group sessions, involving agricultural experts professionally active in south-eastern Sweden. The paper presents how agricultural practitioners perceive a set of common vulnerability indicators, presented through a visualization tool, and their relevance, logic, and applicability to assess and address vulnerability to climate change. The results of this study contribute with perspectives on (i) the relevance and applicability of the commonly used generic indicators for agricultural vulnerability (ii) the assumed correlation of indicators with climate vulnerability and (iii) the identification of missing vulnerability indicators. The study finds that commonly used vulnerability indicators are perceived hard to apply in practice, as definitions and thresholds are often depending on the geographical and temporal scale, as well as the regional context. Additional exposure factors that were identified included extreme events, such as heavy precipitation and external factors such as global food demand and trade-patterns. Further, participants expressed that it is important to include indices that combine effects of multiple climatic changes and in-direct factors, such as policies, regulations and measures. Inherent complexities, context dependencies, and multiple factors should further be included, but entail difficulties in developing suitable indicators. These factors must be addressed by a broader set of qualitative and quantitative indicators, and greater flexibility in the assessment methodology. The interactive vulnerability assessments presented in this paper indicate a need for an integration of quantitative and qualitative aspects and how such indicators could be developed and applied.