Cool Cities: WP1 Plan of Approach

This Plan of Approach outlines how Work Package 1 (WP1) of the Interreg NSR Cool Cities project will support eight partner cities in the governance and planning of urban heat adaptation. It is written for urban professionals, project partners, and urban planners involved in the co-creation of adaptation strategies.

Purpose

Cities in the North Sea Region are experiencing more frequent and intense heat. While many cities are taking action—such as planting trees or installing green roofs—adaptation efforts often do not clearly identify who is most at risk or how priorities should be set. Responsibilities are spread across departments, and available data on social and physical vulnerability is not always used. This makes it harder to plan for long-term, equitable adaptation. WP1 helps cities translate climate risk data and policy goals into clear, inclusive, and actionable planning documents. It focuses on how cities can better organize their internal processes, align priorities, and plan interventions that are fair and effective. The plan also supports cities in thinking about the entire heat adaptation process, even though WP1 itself focuses mainly on the governance and planning phases.

Objectives

WP1 has three main goals:
· To co-create strategic planning documents that guide long-term, equitable urban heat adaptation;
· To test and refine a planning method based on the IPCC climate risk framework and earlier European studies;
· To deliver practical lessons and tools that can be used by other cities working on similar challenges.

Activities

The work is organized into three key activities:

· WP1.1 – Local Context Summary Memos (LCSMs): These are city-specific overviews of climate risk, social vulnerability, and governance context. They combine spatial analysis, policy review, and stakeholder input.
· WP1.2 – Cool Network Plans (CNPs): These plans create a strategic vision for connected cool spaces and routes across each city, supporting long-term resilience goals.
· WP1.3 – Local Action Programmes (LAPs): These are prioritized project lists developed through co-creation, using a participatory Multi-Criteria Analysis (MCA) process to identify the most effective and fair interventions.

Each activity builds on the previous one and includes local workshops, joint reviews, and feedback loops to strengthen collaboration across departments and sectors.

Co-Creation and engagement methods

All activities in WP1 are based on a structured co-creation process. This means that cities and researchers work together from the start to shape the planning tools, choose the data, and make decisions. The process includes joint workshops, feedback sessions, mapping exercises, and guided discussions.

WP1 uses an adapted version of the Delphi method, which combines expert knowledge with step-by-step group reflection. This helps cities bring together people from cities and sectors to agree on goals, risks, and priorities. The method involves multiple rounds of discussion, validation, and adjustment. This makes the results more realistic, widely supported, and easier to use in real planning.

By using co-creation, WP1 ensures that strategies are not only conventionally sound but also locally rooted and ready to be used in real decision-making.

Methodological foundation

WP1 is built on the IPCC risk framework, which defines climate risk as a combination of:
· Hazard (e.g. heatwaves),
· Exposure (who and what is located in at-risk areas),
· Vulnerability, which includes:
o Sensitivity (how strongly people are affected),
o Adaptive capacity (how well they can respond or cope).

The approach adapts tools from the Vulnerability Sourcebook (Fritzsche et al., 2014) and builds on earlier European applications (e.g. Maragno et al., 2020; Ellena et al., 2023). These earlier studies helped show how local data can inform risk mapping—but lacked stakeholder involvement. Cool Cities advances this work by applying and testing the method in eight cities, using structured co-creation to ensure that plans are data-driven and informed by local needs.