ClimateBlue: Co-creating climate adaptation in coastal zones

The Baltic Sea floods of October 2023 hit coastal areas in the Interreg region hard. The costs of infrastructural damage have run into billions, while the human losses and damage to nature may prove irreparable. The storm surge provided an unpleasant foretaste of what is to come as rising sea levels, frequent floods and more extreme weather events will gradually change our landscape.

During the hectic days in October 2023, we gained valuable experience about how society responds when disaster strikes. The event gave a clear indication of the limits in our ability to control nature's dynamism, especially when it comes to water. So, what strategy will we choose for the future, and what will you and I be willing to support when it comes to developing a climate-robust region? Do we continue to keep the water out at all costs? Should we invite the water in to a greater extent? Or, do we accept that water will always win and that we must therefore retreat from flood-prone areas?

It is such conversations that the ClimateBlue project will set in motion - in Denmark, in Germany and across the two countries sharing the Baltic Sea. The overall aim of the project is to provide insights, knowledge, and build social capital for the development of local, regional, and national long-term strategies for coastal retreat. Since neither Danish nor German society currently acknowledge the likely need to give land back to the water, the project expects to contribute to maturing the public and political conversation around water-related societal upheaval and climatic change.

While authorities and municipalities across the Intereg region are beginning to engage their citizens in climate-related discussions in a variety of ways, ClimateBlue takes these initiatives to a new level by linking local interests to common, interconnected water problems around the Baltic Sea. We expect ClimateBlue to institutionalize focused interactions between society, science, and policy in the region and to inspire other regions facing similar challenges now or in the future.