A conceptual co-design framework for structuring bankable climate interventions: design and illustrative instantiation

Along a modest urban river in Birmingham, England, planners want to plant trees — not as decoration, but as climate infrastructure that cools streets, absorbs floodwater, and cleans the air. The catch is money. Public budgets are stretched thin, so any serious climate intervention must eventually convince private investors and insurance companies that it is worth financing. A team of Portuguese researchers reporting in the journal Frontiers in Sustainable Cities believes it has found a way to structure that conversation from the very first citizen workshop to the final investment pitch. Their creation, the Co-design Framework for Bankable Climate Interventions, or CFBCI, is a conceptual reference architecture that welds participatory governance, formal decision mathematics, and enterprise-architecture modelling into a single, traceable workflow — and it has just been put through its first, deliberately formative test.

The problem the framework attacks is fragmentation. When European cities design climate-resilient interventions, the social, technical, and financial dimensions are typically analysed separately: citizens are consulted in one process, engineers run their models in another, and financiers evaluate cost–benefit ratios in a third, with no common architecture linking local requirements, performance indicators, and financing models across stakeholders. Participatory climate governance, multi-criteria decision analysis, and innovative investing models are three mature research strands, yet they are seldom combined in one transparent workflow. The consequence is that stakeholder judgements often cannot be traced into investment decisions, MCDA exercises run as stand-alone studies disconnected from digital platforms, and investing models for climate resilience operate with limited transparency about how criteria were defined, weighted, and negotiated. That opacity complicates learning across projects and undermines the comparability and upscaling of bankable climate solutions.

The empirical home for CFBCI is BLOSSOM, a Horizon Europe research and innovation project running from 2025 to 2029, delivered by a consortium of public authorities, financial and insurance partners, technology providers, and research institutions. BLOSSOM operates through seven pilot sites — Birmingham and Newham in the United Kingdom, Kielce in Poland, Aarhus in Denmark, Lisbon and the Alentejo region in Portugal, and Parma in Italy — grouped into three climatic clusters spanning maritime/temperate oceanic, continental, and Mediterranean conditions. Each cluster contains a front-runner city that trials the full methodology end-to-end and one or more follower sites that adapt the approach to their own contexts. Within this structure, CFBCI is proposed as a core module of the wider BLOSSOM toolkit, intended to structure how stakeholders jointly analyse, compare, and select climate-resilient interventions and investing models across all seven pilots.

Methodologically, the work follows a design-science research logic, in which researchers build purposeful artefacts to solve complex organisational problems, moving through problem identification, solution objectives, design and development, demonstration, evaluation, and communication. The decision-making core is the Analytic Hierarchy Process, developed by Thomas L. Saaty in the late 1970s. AHP organises a complex choice into a hierarchy — goal at the top, criteria and sub-criteria in the middle, alternatives at the bottom — and then translates qualitative stakeholder judgements into quantitative priorities. Stakeholders compare elements two at a time using Saaty’s 1–9 scale to express relative importance, for instance judging financial viability moderately more important than social acceptance. These judgements form comparison matrices, from which priority vectors are derived via the principal eigenvector, while a consistency ratio checks the coherence of preferences and flags inconsistencies for revision. AHP requires minimal quantitative data, making it well suited to heterogeneous groups who bring diverse forms of expertise rather than precise measurements.

To make all of this explicit and traceable, the team turned to enterprise architecture and the ArchiMate modelling standard developed by The Open Group. ArchiMate organises a metamodel as a matrix of six layers — Strategy, Business, Application, Technology, Physical, and Implementation & Migration — crossed with three structural aspects: Passive Structure, the objects and data acted upon; Behaviour, the processes and functions that act; and Active Structure, the actors and components that perform that behaviour. A separate, cross-cutting Motivation aspect captures why the architecture exists, covering Drivers, Goals, and Requirements across all layers. Unlike generic diagramming tools, ArchiMate enforces semantic consistency — a Business Process can only realise a Business Service or serve an Application Service, preventing conceptual errors. Cross-layer relationships such as serving and realisation ensure vertical traceability from strategic intent down to operational execution, which is precisely what fragmented climate decision-making has lacked.

The resulting framework spans all of these levels. At the motivation layer, an external Driver of climate risks and financing gaps influences the strategic Goal of transparently selecting bankable climate-resilient solutions, which is realised by a Capability for bankable climate-resilient decision-making, constrained by Requirements that decisions respect the Investment Model Framework agreed with financial partners, use the KPI system co-defined with cities and communities, and remain tool-integrated. At the business layer, a central five-step process unfolds: defining the decision goal and scope, co-defining criteria and KPIs, performing AHP-based evaluation, negotiating and selecting scenarios, and preparing the decision package — with a feedback loop from scenario negotiation back to criteria definition, so stakeholders can revisit priorities after seeing results. Stakeholder roles are made explicit: city and regional authorities take the Decision Maker role, financial and insurance partners act as Decision Makers and Experts, citizens and NGOs contribute as Citizen Participants, and technical partners serve as Facilitators and Experts. At the application layer, the BLOSSOM Platform comprises an Evaluation and Modelling Toolkit with KPI Manager, a digital-twin-based decision support system, an e-participation tool, and an AHP decision support module, realising services for stakeholder engagement, multi-criteria decision support, and scenario simulation and visualisation.

The framework was illustrated through a single instantiation: the River Cole urban-reforestation intervention in Birmingham, one of seven BLOSSOM pilot sites and the project’s most advanced front-runner case at the time of writing. The Birmingham model maps three primary business actor groups — Birmingham City Council, financial and insurance partners including the Crown Estate and investors, and local communities and NGOs such as River Champions and Birmingham Tree People — onto the five-step co-design process. The main scenario assumes that reforestation along the River Cole serves as a multifunctional intervention reducing peak runoff, lowering ambient temperatures, and improving biodiversity while increasing access to green space, with complementary energy and thermal retrofits extending adaptation to the building scale. Crucially, the authors present this as an ex-ante illustration and partial process instantiation, not outcome validation: the AHP-based aggregation and the financial modelling have not yet been executed in the present study, and verifying whether selected interventions actually reduce risks or support investment decisions is identified as future empirical work.

Evaluation took two complementary formative routes. The first applied the Bunge–Wand–Weber ontological model, a theoretically grounded method that compares a generic reference model against a specific instantiation using four deficiency types: incompleteness, when a model contains too few constructs to represent the domain; excess, when superfluous constructs persist; redundancy, when several elements represent what is ontologically a single construct; and overload, when a single element stands for several distinct constructs. The analysis revealed three incompleteness gaps, one excess element, two redundancies, and two overload issues. In the Birmingham instantiation, the omitted Facilitator, Expert, and Citizen Participant roles were precisely the roles played by named River Cole actors on the ground, risking an understatement of the work stakeholders actually carried out. Both the generic model and the instantiation also under-specify regulatory context, aggregating multiple concerns into a small number of Drivers and Goals without specific Requirements for data quality, participation thresholds, or investor KPIs. At the same time, the evaluation broadly confirmed the adequacy of the framework’s core structure: the five-step co-design process and the three-tier application architecture required no structural redesign, only refinement.

The second route was a co-creation session held on 23 February 2026, embedded within BLOSSOM’s standing online coordination meeting for front-runner and follower city representatives rather than convened as a separate workshop. Participants annotated layers and relationships to flag gaps or redundancies, and the session yielded three refinements the authors judged salient. First, participants identified Legislative Requirements at EU, national, and local levels — such as EU Green Deal directives and national adaptation plans — as a critical omission in the motivation layer, currently treated only as implicit drivers. Second, the framework-defined Facilitator and Expert roles were flagged as potentially overrepresented given budget constraints in smaller cities, where resource-limited municipalities often require multi-hatted personnel, suggesting merged or rotating role assignments. Third, participants advised developing a concise implementation guide with step-by-step workflows, decision-hierarchy templates, data checklists, and troubleshooting guidance for AHP pairwise comparisons. The authors note that the consistency between the ontological analysis and the stakeholder feedback represents overlap between two independent formative assessments, not evidence of consensus or bankability.

The limitations are acknowledged plainly. The study relies on conceptual design and a single illustrative instantiation, without an executed empirical AHP cycle — no pairwise-comparison matrices, weights, consistency ratios, or rankings — and without full-scale deployment across all seven pilots. The co-creation session had unlogged individual attendance and organisational profiles, and the operational definition of bankability has not been tested against a real financial outcome; claims about bankability in this study are therefore conceptual rather than demonstrated. ArchiMate modelling also demands specialised tools and expertise that may hinder adoption by resource-constrained municipalities. Future work will pursue a full empirical AHP cycle for the River Cole case or another pilot, deployment across the remaining six BLOSSOM pilots measuring decision traceability and actual investment mobilisation, and exploration of complementarity with parallel European initiatives such as CLIMINVEST’s bankable-by-design marketplace. For now, CFBCI stands as a scaffold rather than a finished product — a conceptual reference architecture at a formative stage, offering cities a shared visual and mathematical language for turning tree-planting schemes, green roofs, and blue-green infrastructure into decisions that citizens helped shape and investors can scrutinise.

Subject of Research: A conceptual co-design framework for structuring bankable climate interventions: design and illustrative instantiation

Article Title: A conceptual co-design framework for structuring bankable climate interventions: design and illustrative instantiation

Article References: Varela da Costa, J., Valente, C., Pestana, G., & Mira da Silva, M. (2026). A conceptual co-design framework for structuring bankable climate interventions: design and illustrative instantiation. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities, 8, Article 1951346. https://doi.org/10.3389/frsc.2026.1951346

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/frsc.2026.1951346

Keywords: conceptual, co-design, framework, structuring, bankable, climate, interventions, design, illustrative, instantiation, scientific research