CASE STUDY
Athens Climate Lab
A series of 4 workshops based on systemic impact methodology for strengthening the dialogue for climate change in Athens.
What was this?
Athens Climate Lab was a series of 4 workshops aiming to enhance the dialogue on climate change in Athens. The initiative was organized by the Global Shapers Athens Hub. We supported the workshop series by designing the program based on systemic impact methodology and facilitating the workshops. Climate change affects and will affect Greece even more in the coming years. Decades of debate and effort on climate change have generated initiatives, movements and organizations to produce significant work. Still, why do we find it difficult to implement actions that tackle climate change even though dozens of them have been proposed? Who are the main actors in the debate on climate change in Athens and what are the dynamics and relationships between them that affect the environment in which we live? Though this series of workshops, we managed to create a safe space for all stakeholders to reconcile, identify the main challenges that make it difficult to tackle climate change in Athens and propose new, modern ideas.
100+ participants
20+ organizations
8 hours of systemic analysis
Methodology
The 4 workshops were built on the methodology of systemic approach. The purpose of the workshops was to familiarize the participants with the concept of in-depth study on important issues and to encourage meaningful collaborations. Furthermore, the workshops used fast and effective methods for problem studying, while the partcipants understood the systemic approach in an empirical way. More specifically, the topics of the 4 workshops were developed as follows: 1) The impact of climate change in Athens 2) Realistic and systemic study of climate change in Athens 3) Vision of the ideal Athens 4) Bridging the gap between the biggest vision and the reality of climate change in Athens today The workshops were conducted through the Zoom platform, while practical digital tools, such as miro and mentimeter, were used to enhance interaction.
Impact
More than 100 participants joined the interactive workshops and engaged actively by expressing their thoughts and arguments. Representatives from civil society organizations, academia, local government, the European and global political scene, the corporate world, the media and young people discussed the challenges of climate change in the system we live in and suggested joint solutions. During the discussions, the methodology of systemic impact (the study of changes that substantially affect a system) was applied and networking among participants was strengthened. At the same time, during the Athens Climate Lab, there has been created a mapping of the important stakeholders on climate change issues in Athens. This mapping was created by systematically capturing the relationships and the driving forces among them and it consists a key prerequisite for understanding the correlations of influence between stakeholders. We believe that the results from the Athens Climate Lab series will contribute to the selection and development of initiatives to overcome any obstacles and to implement the appropriate solutions that tackle climate change in Athens.
