Citizens Weigh Trade-Offs as Scientists Test a New Climate Foresight Framework

Researchers led by Havva Ebrahimipour developed and piloted a three-phase participatory framework that moves communities from imagining climate-resilient futures for 2050 to explicitly weighing and prioritizing the trade-offs between alternative pathways. The framework was tested in two deliberately contrasting European Living Labs: the Mediterranean island of Chios in Greece and the Baltic capital region of Vilnius in Lithuania.

The motivation is a persistent gap the authors call vision-to-decision. Global frameworks, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, call for participatory planning that embeds local priorities into future-oriented climate action, yet mainstream urban planning often remains rigid and disconnected from local concerns. The IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report introduced Climate Resilient Development and highlighted the need for inclusive processes involving a broader set of actors, while the EU Mission on Adaptation’s Implementation Plan explicitly calls for iterative feedback loops and co-created solutions involving science, policy, and society. Despite such initiatives, the study notes, many plans remain fragmented and poorly aligned with local needs, and top-down approaches frequently exclude marginalized groups—the people most affected by climate change.

The framework itself is methodologically precise. Phase one is a participatory future scenario-building workshop in which participants identify key drivers of climate resilience, cluster them using the STEEP framework—social, technological, economic, environmental, and political—and prioritize them through consensus methods such as dot-voting. A morphological analysis matrix then links compatible developments across drivers, and participants synthesize the results into narrative scenarios, with each workshop aiming to produce four to five. Crucially, the evaluation criteria used to judge those scenarios are not predefined by experts; participants co-develop them, reflecting local priorities such as desirability, feasibility, and impact.

Phase two converts those qualitative narratives into structured, weighted data using the Analytic Hierarchy Process, a multi-criteria decision analysis method valued for its usability without advanced analytical skills. Participants complete two pairwise-comparison surveys on a 17-point bidirectional scale—a symmetric extension of Saaty’s classical nine-point scale designed to let non-experts express both the direction and intensity of their preferences in a single item. The first survey weights the criteria; the second compares scenario pairs against each criterion. A custom R-based computational tool built for the study converts responses into comparison matrices, calculates Perron–Frobenius eigenvector priority weights for each participant, aggregates them via geometric means, and produces final scenario rankings in which more important criteria carry greater influence.

Phase three is an expert-led refinement workshop, explicitly framed as a bridge rather than a veto. Sixteen experts from academia, policymaking, and institutional delegations—eleven women and five men—reviewed each scenario through a SWOT analysis, assessing strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats to surface implementation barriers and untapped opportunities that citizen groups focused on visioning had not necessarily considered. The authors stress that the SWOT technique was deployed not as a quality judgment but as a structured diagnostic tool, and that insights are intended to feed back into subsequent participatory iterations, preserving the framework’s collaborative character.

The pilot implementations produced strikingly different visions of resilience. In Chios, eighteen participants recruited through the Quadruple Helix model—public authorities, citizens, academia, and business—generated five scenarios leaning toward ecological recovery, water management, sustainable tourism, and hazard preparedness, reflecting the island’s exposure to wildfire and water-scarcity risks. Traditional practices such as water harvesting and fire-resistant reforestation featured prominently, and participants prioritized criteria including environmental impact, adaptability, and motivational aspects. In Vilnius, twelve participants representing government, industry, the municipality, NGOs, academia, students, and a senior community association produced four scenarios framed mainly through governance capacity, communication, citizen engagement, smart infrastructure, and climate-neutral transformation, with greater weight given to sustainability, inclusivity, and shared values.

The AHP results mirrored those contrasts. In Vilnius, Scenario 4 was consistently the most preferred across most criteria, with Scenario 3 second, reflecting a shared orientation toward governance innovation and smart city development; participants also showed greater consensus, indicated by narrower standard deviation bands around average weights. In Chios, preferences were more dispersed, with Scenario 1—which integrates traditional knowledge with innovation and community empowerment—and Scenario 4—which emphasizes top-down policies and large-scale technological infrastructure—frequently emerging as top choices depending on the criterion. The authors caution that the diagrams show within-city patterns and should not be read as direct comparisons between the two Living Labs, and they suggest the variability in Chios may stem from either the broader thematic scope of its scenarios or differing participant interpretations.

The authors are candid about the study’s limits. As a pilot test, the workshops involved only eighteen participants in Chios and twelve in Vilnius, sufficient to demonstrate feasibility but constraining representativeness; detailed demographic information on vulnerability status was not systematically collected, partly because small groups risk making individuals identifiable. The paper also flags the known risk of tokenism in future workshops, where participation can become symbolic or well-connected actors dominate. Importantly, the framework stops short of formal governance: the iterative feedback loop back to scenario building is still ongoing and its results are not reported, and the study concludes that it establishes the preconditions for anticipatory governance rather than its full realization, since closing the loop requires institutional embedding within municipal planning cycles.

Even so, the conceptual contribution is substantial. By letting stakeholders define the evaluative hierarchy, the framework shifts the public’s role from passive informants to active co-designers of future knowledge, making implicit priorities explicit and revealing disagreements—inclusion versus feasibility versus environmental impact—that would otherwise remain unstructured. Rather than producing a single optimal scenario, the process surfaced multiple legitimate futures grounded in local interpretations of resilience, demonstrating that resilience is not a universal metric but a pluralistic value. The authors argue the real challenge for the next generation of futures research is not refining the participatory tools but embedding them within administrative routines and accountability structures; without such institutional commitment, even the most sophisticated foresight remains advisory. Future applications, they suggest, should involve larger and more diverse participation, systematic documentation of under-represented groups, adequate budgeting for local-language translation and facilitator training, and, ultimately, formal integration into long-term policy mandates.

Subject of Research: A multi-method participatory foresight framework combining scenario workshops, AHP prioritization and expert refinement, tested in Chios and Vilnius.

Article Title: Co-creating climate-resilient cities: a multi-method participatory approach for future scenario building and prioritization

Article References: Ebrahimipour, H., Mačiulienė, M., Kotrikla, A. M., Rothe, F.-F., Gulevičiūtė, G., Skaržauskienė, A., Kovaitė, K., Polydoropoulou, A., & Fameli, K. M. (2026). Co-creating climate-resilient cities: a multi-method participatory approach for future scenario building and prioritization. European Journal of Futures Research, 14(1), Article 29. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40309-026-00291-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40309-026-00291-x

Keywords: climate resilience, participatory foresight, scenario building, Analytic Hierarchy Process, urban planning, co-creation, Living Labs, Chios, Vilnius, adaptation, multi-criteria decision analysis, anticipatory governance