Peer reviews on transformative innovation for climate change adaptation : the national case : Slovenia

Within the frame of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC) work on transformative innovation for climate resilience, in collaboration with DG CLIMA as orchestrator of the European Mission on Adaptation to Climate Change, DG R&I and contracted experts, JRC's Unit B7 organised during the second semester of 2024 a series of on-line Peer Review workshops on "Transformative Innovation for better Climate Change Adaptation". In order to be more practical JRC's Unit B7 offered to the case study territories to address Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) implementation bottlenecks in a few concrete territories. Organising peer reviews with volunteers among the 14 territories covered by case studies was the most promising way to federate the experience of peers from territories across Europe on how to best address the bottlenecks. The main goal of the workshops was to help volunteering territories to define pathways towards integrating transformative innovation in their climate adaptation strategies, based on learning and exchanges with peers. Also, the aim of these peer-reviews was to experiment the methodology of the peer reviews approach in three different levels of territories (national, regional, and urban). The Peer Reviews followed up on case studies published throughout 2024 on a diverse set of EU territories that also served as a starting point of the analysis of the CCA implementation bottlenecks. Among the 14 case study territories in the Autumn 2024 three territories volunteered to undergo peer review process which were also representative of three territorial levels: National (Slovenia), regional (region Blekinge, Sweden) and urban (City of Turku, Finland). Since the topic is complex and nobody has the full answer, creating a safe space for peer exchanges based on openness and 'no naming and shaming' was the method proposed in the peer reviews to support advances in this field under the Chatham House rule. The three reports, based on the three aforementioned territorial granularities, aim to lay the ground for the strong and urgent imperative to deploy adaptation strategies at the right territorial level and compile the valuable testimonies shared by peers from other territories to overcome specific bottlenecks in implementation of the CCA strategies.