Accelerating Climate Resilient Development at Adaptation Futures 2025
When researchers from CRED (Center for Climate Resilient Development at NMBU) travelled to Adaptation Futures 2025, they brought more than academic insights. They brought practical experience from the Follo region, where researchers work alongside municipalities, communities, planners, students, and practitioners to advance climate resilient development (CRD) in practice.
Adaptation Futures is one of the world’s leading conferences on climate adaptation, gathering scientists, policymakers, Indigenous leaders, practitioners, youth, and international organisations. Within this global arena, CRED organised a post-conference workshop entitled “Accelerating Climate Resilient Development Practice.” The workshop addressed the urgent need to put scientific findings into practice by focusing on how CRD actually happens in the real world, i.e. how measures to reduce emissions and adapt to climate risks are integrated to advance sustainable development for all.
Opening the Space for Multiple Knowledges
The workshop began with a fundamental question: climate resilient development — to whom, and defined by whom?
Participants explored how CRD must create space for multiple knowledge systems, including Indigenous knowledge, lived experience, and disability perspectives. Examples from Aotearoa New Zealand and southern Africa showed how local actors reshape climate action by foregrounding voices often marginalised in formal planning.
The message was clear: resilience cannot rest on technical expertise alone. It must recognise cultural, relational, and experiential knowledge. Inclusion is not symbolic — it changes priorities, timelines, funding flows, and decision-making processes.
The Politics of Growth, Equity and Time
A second discussion addressed a challenge familiar in Follo and globally: how local governments balance growth, sustainability, and climate responsibility.
Drawing on cases from Europe and Africa, panellists highlighted how political structures, path dependencies, and institutional norms can lock cities into carbon-intensive trajectories. Advancing CRD therefore requires more than technical fixes; it demands political courage and long-term thinking.
Participants identified a core principle: engaging with time. Climate action must balance urgency with equity. It must move quickly, but not at the expense of inclusion. It must shift from short-term projects toward generational perspectives, while allowing imperfect beginnings so ambition does not stall action.
CRD is not about speed alone — it is about pacing transformation responsibly.
Six Principles for Accelerating CRD
Through facilitated dialogue, researchers and practitioners co-developed six guiding principles:
Engage with Time – Move beyond short-termism. Connect small-scale initiatives with long-term institutional change.
Engage Collectively – Shift from individualised action to collective approaches. Place equity and accessibility at the centre.
Engage with Knowledge – Break silos. Use diverse methods. Create space for quieter voices. Start with shared visions and values.
Engage with Resourcing – Recognise that finance is political. Ensure equitable participation and empower those with lived experience.
Engage with Transformation – Challenge business-as-usual models. Anchor local strategies in broader legal and policy frameworks.
Engage in Relations – Build trust, connect spheres of influence, and weave together actors and knowledge systems.
These principles were grounded in practical examples, from managed retreat and disability inclusion to community-led adaptation and municipal planning.
From Workshop to Movement
The engagement did not stop with discussion. Participants proposed follow-up actions: developing a shared case study library, creating a CRD atlas, co-producing evolving principles, hosting future reflection sessions, and building accessible toolkits and storytelling platforms.
This momentum reflected a broader conference focus on locally led adaptation, justice, and transformative practice. CRED’s contribution from Follo demonstrated that resilience is not invented at global conferences and exported outward. It is built locally — in municipal decisions, community dialogues, and everyday governance — and then shared globally.
A Two-Way Exchange
CRED arrived not only to present research, but to engage in mutual learning. Experiences from Follo resonated internationally, while insights from Pacific Island nations, African community networks, and Indigenous governance deepened CRED’s understanding of CRD.
The workshop underscored that accelerating CRD requires more than better data or models. It requires trust, equity, diverse knowledge systems, political awareness, just financing structures, and leaders who act as facilitators rather than controllers.
From Follo to the Future
The climate crisis is global, but climate resilient development trajectories are built through actions from the local to the global. By sharing lessons from Follo at Adaptation Futures 2025, CRED contributed to a growing international movement toward climate resilient development that is equitable, relational, and transformative.
The impact lies not only in the principles drafted, but in the network formed with researchers, practitioners, and policymakers, committed to advancing CRD in their own contexts.
From Follo to the world and back again, climate resilient development is becoming a shared practice, co-created, inclusive, and grounded in people’s lived experiences of climate change.