PROGRAMME

Climate change is one of the most critical issues of our times, as it is predicted to have detrimental social, environmental, and economic impacts. A radical transition from our current system is needed to accomplish climate mitigation and adaptation. This transition requires the adoption and implementation of innovative solutions in both the technological and social realms. It is important that the innovations come from a strong bottom-up process, involving citizen’s, to be effectively accepted and implemented. The Living Labs (LLs) are initiatives that started around 20 years ago and aim to co-create innovation through the involvement of users in real-life settings. According to a more elaborated definition by ENoLL (European Network of Living Labs), LLs are open innovation ecosystems in real-life environments using iterative feedback processes throughout a lifecycle approach of an innovation to create sustainable impact. By their definition, LLs appear to be a suitable approach to empower citizen’s participation in the necessary innovations for climate change response. This paper builds on a bibliometric quantitative analysis of the scientific literature to explore how the concept of the living labs is employed in the formation of innovative solutions regarding climate change adaptation and mitigation. The results of the study will be used in the facilitation of the LL of Chios at the framework of the Horizon project CLIMAS. The main project ambition is to learn from the ongoing and past experiences in citizens' engagement in climate change action such as Climate assemblies and Living labs and help the diverse European regions and local communities to resist through deliberative democracy. The project will deliver an innovative problem-oriented climate adoption Toolbox, co-designed together with stakeholders by applying a values-based approach, design thinking methods and citizen science to promote their direct engagement and empowerment. All that will be carried out with a gender and diversity approach. In this paper, the Scopus database was searched using the keywords “Climate change” and “Living Labs”. There were 90 papers found, and most of them (84) were published from 2019 till now indicating a tremendous growth of the scientific interest in the subject. Most of the papers come from European institutions (>70%) reflecting the importance that is given in Europe to citizens’ participation for the co-creation of innovation regarding climate change. Then, the text-mining software VOSviewer was used to extract the keywords (author or index) that occurred at least 5 times in the corpus of the 90 papers. The keyword analysis gives the first indications on the directions in a research field. The process resulted in 15 keywords. The most frequently occurring keyword was “sustainability”, as the term relates to three pillars, namely the environmental protection, the economic development, and the social welfare, that are affected by climate change. Additionally, according to its classic definition as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs”, sustainability has a strong focus on the future state of the environment which is now widely accepted that will be compromised by the consequences of climate change, unless a radical shift in the energy paradigm will occur. A second bunch of keywords is related to the urban environment (“urban living lab”, “urban planning”, “smart city”, “urban growth”). Urban living labs have become a popular form of urban experimental innovation in many countries in the last decade. These labs respond to the increased complexity of future challenges calling for local solutions that acknowledge the local conditions—political, technical, and social. “Energy efficiency” is also a term that appears frequently in the literature and relates to the urban environment and climate change mitigation. A third group of keywords relates living labs and climate change with the protection of natural environment (“nature-based solutions”, “biodiversity”, “ecosystems”). Finally, commonly found keywords are related to the scope, the organization, and the outputs of the living labs (“conceptual framework”, “stakeholder”, “co-creation”, “experimentation”, “innovation”, “decision making”). In conclusion, the last 5 years there is a tremendous growth in the scientific literature on the employment of living labs in empowering citizens for co-creating and testing innovative solutions for climate response. The papers address urban and natural problems, whereas there is also a focus on the processes that take place inside the living labs.