Deciding on Climate Change Adaptation Measures: A Living-Lab-Approach Profiting from VGI in an Interactive Mapping-Service

Abstract. A great variety of local sectors, e. g. water management, urban planning, agriculture, forestry, regional development, soil protection, nature conservation, and others, is nowadays concerned with deciding on climate change adaptation measures. Sectoral departments perceive that it is necessary to build bridges between different administrational offices due to various dependences and interactions. Increasing heavy rainfalls, for instance, are an often-mentioned threat that is caused by climate change in certain regions. Heavy rainfalls lead to flooding on the one, and soil erosion on the other hand. Flooding, as well as erosion, cause damages for buildings, road networks, and other infrastructures. Both events can also have negative aftermaths for agriculture (loss of arable land) and settlements (landslides, accumulation of mud on roads or in gardens). To mitigate such threats, it is often desirable not to start single, sectoral actions, but to develop measures that take into account comprehensively the different perspectives from relevant sectors.

Meanwhile, the BebeR-project, a collaborative network within which all relevant actors participate in the decision-making processes on climate change adaptation measures, was finished as a follow-up of the foregoing project KLIMPASS (https://klimpass.de/). Spatial data and web-map-services played a central supporting role to enable fair collaboration and decision making, as this paper will show.