Accelerating place-based climate action through community empowerment: Insights from the Community CoLabs
This autumn, Climate KIC embarked on a roadshow for a series of Community CoLabs across Europe to re-energise engagement among its Community and catalyse place-based climate action. The Community CoLabs (Collaboration Laboratories) are an event format launched by Climate KIC in 2025, and were designed as a platform for multi-stakeholder dialogue and co-creation. The CoLab events reflect Climate KIC’s mission to orchestrate systemic change by connecting public and private actors across value chains, sectors, and geographies.
In 2025, four CoLabs took place, in Slovenia, Italy, Spain, and Poland, each advancing the sustainable transition through localised, thematic focus and collaborative innovation.
Beyond the legacy of the Slovenian Deep Demonstration
The Slovenian CoLab held in Ljubljana as part of the Circular Economy Hotspot Conference gathered startups, public agencies, SMEs, and research institutes to reflect on four years of circular economy progress under Climate KIC’s Deep Demonstration initiative in Slovenia.
The Slovenian Deep Demonstration is a multi-year partnership with the Slovenian government that aimed to develop pathways for a more radical transition to climate neutrality through a circular economy, using a systems innovation approach.
The event celebrated some major achievements such as the establishment of a Policy Lab and explored the challenges of scaling a portfolio approach for innovation.
Diverse stakeholders highlighted the impact of the Deep Demonstration and the importance of procurement as a lever for accelerating circularity in Slovenia. Ana Vele, representing the Slovene Enterprise Fund, an implementing body of the Ministry of Economy, Tourism and Sport, explained that the Deep Demonstration “allowed us to create internal sustainability policies, shifting our view of sustainability as an add-on to a principle that needs to be systemically integrated in every enterprise. We now aim to collaborate closely with the Ministries to design procurement calls for start-ups in the circular and raw materials fields that apply all learnings and methodology of the Deep Demonstration”.
Accelerating the blue and green economy in Europe’s coastal areas
The Italian CoLab convened local entrepreneurs, institutions, and innovators in Cagliari (Sardinia, Italy), to focus on actionable strategies for advancing the blue and green economy.
Such conversations are particularly relevant in regions such as Sardinia, where the economy related to maritime activities (trade, tourism, fishery, and more) and the protection of the environment need to couple with a focus on sustainability and innovation.
The event was hosted with local partner Sardegna Ricerche and Enterprise Europe Network and highlighted the importance of ecosystem collaboration and place-based innovation.
Participants discussed how to leverage Sardinia’s unique assets, such as its positioning in the Mediterranean and vibrant ecosystem of startups and SMEs among others, to drive climate resilience and sustainable growth in the region, creating a model that can then be exported to other coastal regions across Europe. The conversation highlighted the need to strengthen cross-sector partnerships between private businesses and public stakeholders to de-risk key innovations and design portfolios that allow us to experiment and learn in the maritime and environmental industry.
Community-led housing and sustainable transitions
Barcelona’s CoLab in Catalonia explored the transformative potential of community-led housing as a driver for circularity, equity, and climate justice. The event was purposefully hosted in the Can Batlló neighbourhood, an old industrial complex that turned into a vibrant hub of social innovation thanks to urban restructuring and the participation of the local community in the redefinition of spaces.
Participants visited La Borda, Barcelona’s first cooperative residential building, and BLOC4, one of Europe’s largest cooperative hubs, thus experiencing how cooperative construction and social innovation can embed sustainability and circularity principles in the built environment. After the visits, Expert from Lacol, Holon, and the Department of Urban Planning and Housing of the Barcelona City Council demonstrated the convergence of cooperative, institutional, and systemic approaches—framing housing as a catalyst for just transitions.
The event underscored Barcelona’s emerging model of public–community collaboration, where the choice of circular materials, consultations with the residents, and municipality-wide policies on pricing and energy retrofitting made the houses affordable and sustainable, embedding care, participation, and climate responsibility into urban development.
Advancing green public-private partnerships
The Warsaw CoLab, in Poland, was attended by government, business, academia, and civil society and aimed to understand how to unlock Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) for climate innovation.
Through collaborative dialogues and expert panels, participants mapped the PPP landscape in Poland, identified key actors, and developed strategies for building trust, sharing risk, and fostering cross-sector innovation. As highlighted during the panel, PPPs can be crucial levers to scale decarbonisation projects as they combine public funding and private businesses resources to push innovation in strategic sectors.
As Aleksandra Goldys, Policy Innovation Lead at Climate KIC, put it, “Complex challenges require the combined expertise of public and private actors. For this purpose, understanding how to build and utilise PPPs is essential, not only as a specific procurement tool, but as an ongoing framework for cross-sector collaboration with a systemic approach.”
The 2025 Community CoLabs empowered local communities to come together to share knowledge and resources to achieve a just, resilient, and sustainable future, while fostering competitivity and entrepreneurship throughout Europe.
Do you want to take part in our future CoLabs and partner with us for similar opportunities? Join Climate KIC Community today!