Climate resilience remains a crucial goal for the built environment. Our ancestors successfully inhabited some of the Earth's harshest climates, from the Arctic to deserts. If they could overcome such challenges, why should our high-tech society fail?

In a white paper, the 4TU Domain Acceleration Team (DAT) on Climate Adaptation and Mitigation, composed of members from four technical universities in the Netherlands, examines why modern societies struggle to achieve climate adaptation and mitigation targets.

While mitigation efforts, such as reducing CO2 emissions, have clear, universally agreed-upon goals, adaptation efforts tend to be local and lack established targets and benchmarks, making progress challenging to track.

Climate mitigation and adaptation measures in the built environment are interdependent, requiring careful coordination to avoid inefficiencies or counterproductive outcomes. For instance, the energy transition (climate mitigation) demands major infrastructure changes, while climate adaptation requires significant urban modifications and underground work. These efforts must align to ensure resilient and future-proof inhabitancy of urban areas; without integration, some measures may hinder or negate the benefits of others.

A key challenge is the lack of cross-sector collaboration. Different sectors—energy, climate, mobility—operate under distinct frameworks, policies, and timelines, complicating the implementation of solutions. The shortage of skilled professionals in the Netherlands limits the capacity for cross-sector collaboration, as many lack expertise to navigate both climate and energy sectors, as well as spatial planning policy.

Similarly, while spatial analysis tools such as Klimaateffectatlas and Toolbox Klimaatadaptatie exist, they typically focus on individual challenges like mitigation or adaptation. There is a critical need for also integrating tools that assess the spatial implications of policy goals across sectors, and temporal scales.

The white paper addresses these challenges and explores potential cross-disciplinary synergies, aiming to drive innovative solutions for future climate resilience, where climate adaptation and mitigation always go hand in hand.

Citizens are critical actors in sustainable transitions. Via their (consumer) behaviours, adoption of sustainable practices and technologies, grassroots initiatives, local actions, citizen science, protest, and involvement in participative decision making, they entail considerable influence. Recently, there is increasing attention to collective citizen action, in particular in the domain of the sustainable energy transition. Community energy collectives, often in the form of renewable energy cooperatives, are a manifestation of civil society in the energy domain. They engage in agency to achieve sustainable energy goals, lower carbon emissions, and foster social innovation. They engage with local communities, target group persuasion and embark on complex organizational processes to develop projects. To tackle institutional inertia, renewable energy cooperatives take on experimentation and lobby for institutional change. This chapter presents an overview on how renewable energy cooperatives use their agency to achieve sustainable transition goals. It ends with suggestions for future research.

Evidence from academic studies that analyze social and institutional factors that influence success with community energy projects is scarce. To address this, we pose the question: What are the social, organizational, and governance factors that explain success with ‘local low-carbon energy initiatives’ (LLCEIs)? To answer this question, claims were first established pertaining to three groups of social factors: i.e. (i) those related to the LLCEI itself; (ii) factors related to the interaction between an LLCEI and the local community; and (iii) the presence of supportive governance settings and linkages with local government and intermediaries. These were analyzed using a variable-oriented cross-case design involving fourteen LLCEIs in the Dutch Province of Fryslân. Results show that there is a difference in the sets of factors that positively correlate with various measures of LLCEI success. Factors related to the LLCEI (i.e. internal organizational factors) correlate with collective energy projects and to a lesser extent with individual projects realized. Items related to interactions of the LLCEI with the local community primarily correlate with the customer base and to a lesser extent with individual projects realized. Finally, items related to the governance setting correlate most strongly with individual projects realized.

Recent scholarly attention shows that grassroots civil society low-carbon energy initiatives increasingly become part of the subnational climate change governance landscape. Despite their potency in view of consumer-owned distributed generation and enhanced citizen influence in the organization of the energy infrastructure, local low-carbon energy initiatives (LLCEIs) struggle to become viable alternatives to the centralized, private oriented energy system. To further LLCEI development, support needs to build their capacities; alleviate institutional hurdles and barriers stemming from the fossil fuel-based energy regime; and open up the system for the uptake, acceptance or breakthrough of LLCEIs. Evidence suggests that so-called "intermediaries" form a part of the solution in addressing these issues. Despite previous attempts at analyzing intermediary roles and activities vis-à-vis the development of community energy, the reality of the various roles and strategies intermediaries can employ and the support LLCEIs require to further develop have not yet been synthesized in a comprehensive analytical framework. This article aims to fill this gap by developing such a framework. We reflect on the analytical framework by evaluating the intermediary support structure in a specific case: the Province of Fryslân. From the analysis, we conclude that the Frisian case provided modest support to the claim that intermediary support is effective in addressing the needs of LLCEIs as the strategies and roles observed represent a complete and coherent support structure.