Everyday adaptation: how local climate ambassadors are driving change in Valencia
The challenge
Across Spain’s Mediterranean coast, communities are increasingly living on the frontlines of climate change. In the Valencia region, residents have faced a growing combination of extreme weather events, from prolonged droughts and record-breaking heatwaves to devastating floods and wildfires.
The October 2024 flash floods were among the deadliest in Europe in recent history with over 220 confirmed deaths resulting from the floods in Valencia, and affected more than 190,000 people. It also served as a stark example of the systemic nature of climate risks. Infrastructure, public health, ecosystems and local livelihoods were all impacted, demonstrating that climate adaptation cannot be addressed through isolated technical solutions alone.
Building resilience requires new ways of engaging people, institutions and communities in shaping responses to climate change. It also requires creating opportunities for citizens to contribute their knowledge, experiences and ideas to local adaptation efforts.
The intervention
Through the Horizon Europe project DesirMED, Climate KIC and project partners are supporting Mediterranean regions to accelerate climate adaptation through Nature-Based Solutions and systemic approaches to resilience.
A key part of this work has been the development of the DesirMED Climate Ambassadors network, which brings together citizens, students, researchers and practitioners from across the Mediterranean who are actively contributing to climate adaptation in their communities. To date, the network has engaged 77 Climate Ambassadors from participating Mediterranean regions, creating opportunities for peer learning, public engagement and citizen-led innovation.
In Valencia, this approach took shape through initiatives such as the Valencia Sustainability Hackathon, which brought together 60 participants and six challengers, organised in partnership with the Generalitat Valenciana, DesirMED and Climate KIC just weeks after the region experienced catastrophic flooding. Two teams of participants took on the DesirMED challenge, and three of them have since become Climate Ambassadors, sharing their stories through the Climate Adaptation Diaries. Rather than focusing solely on technical solutions, participants were encouraged to explore how communities themselves could become active agents of adaptation.
What changed?
The hackathon demonstrated how bringing together diverse perspectives can generate new approaches to climate resilience. The hackathon brought regional authorities, environmental practitioners and citizens from different professional backgrounds into a shared problem-solving process, with the Valencia cluster setting the challenge and working directly with the teams developing responses to it.
For Eva Meza Rivera, a communications specialist originally from Colombia, joining a challenge focused on wildfire prevention initially felt outside her expertise. “At the beginning, I was a bit hesitant because I am not an engineer,” she says. “But in the participating team, we were from different backgrounds and experiences, ready to learn new things.” That diversity of collaborating actors became a strength. Eva’s team identified a key barrier to community preparedness: traditional awareness campaigns were failing to engage residents. “People were tired of attending repetitive workshops,” says Eva. “We needed to find a different way to engage the community.” In response, the team developed ideas for gamified education activities and a podcast series co-created with schools and local associations, helping shift climate communication from one-way information sharing towards more participatory and community-led engagement.
For forestry engineer Alejandro Cornelles, the challenge highlighted opportunities to combine technology and citizen participation. His team’s proposal centred on a public app that could provide residents in high-risk areas with real-time alerts, prevention tools and self-assessment resources, alongside incentives to encourage preventative action. The proposals remain at concept stage and are informing the Valencia cluster’s wider work to increase the region’s resilience to wildfires. At the same time, participants recognised that technology alone would not create resilience.
As fellow participant Alberto Lora Martin explains, their proposal also included citizen science initiatives, youth participation groups and community responsibility mechanisms designed to strengthen local ownership of wildfire prevention. “The idea was to strengthen the sense of community and highlight that fire prevention is a collective effort,” says Alberto. The impact extended beyond the event itself. In interviews after the event, participants described a stronger understanding of the connections between climate risks, local action and collective responsibility. The hackathon created new connections between citizens, public authorities and climate practitioners, while showing how collective problem-solving can generate new ideas for tackling adaptation challenges.
The Climate Ambassadors initiative has also continued to grow across the Mediterranean through educational and engagement activities. More than 50 students and early-career researchers from Greece, Cyprus, Italy and Spain took part in the DesirMED International Summer School in Greece, gaining practical knowledge in climate adaptation, water resilience and Nature-Based Solutions. Additional Climathons are planned across the participation regions, further expanding opportunities for citizen participation in adaptation efforts.
Meanwhile, ambassadors are increasingly becoming visible advocates for adaptation. Through initiatives such as the DesirMED Photo Exhibition and the upcoming DesirMED Adaptation Festival in Cyprus, ambassadors are helping bring climate resilience conversations into public spaces, connecting research, policy and lived experience.
Why it matters
Climate adaptation depends not only on new technologies or infrastructure, but also on people’s ability to participate in shaping resilient futures for their communities. The DesirMED Climate Ambassadors network is contributing to this shift by helping create new relationships between citizens, researchers, policymakers and practitioners across the Mediterranean. Through hackathons, training programmes, exhibitions and public engagement activities, participants are building the skills, networks and confidence participants are building the skills, networks and confidence that can help translate climate awareness into action.
This contribution is particularly important in regions such as Valencia, where communities are already experiencing the realities of climate change. By creating spaces for collaboration, experimentation and learning, Climate KIC and the DesirMED project are helping strengthen the social and institutional foundations needed for long-term climate adaptation.
More Climate Ambassador stories: