The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest report on the state of the climate championed local solutions, especially for successful adaptation in the regions most vulnerable to the climate crisis. The message is clear – we need to put resources and money in the hands of local communities.

Despite this rhetoric, there are still relatively few examples of climate initiatives that foreground public participation and localisation. Twenty-first century collective intelligence – combining people’s knowledge and skills, with new forms of data and technology – could help to bridge this gap.

Collective intelligence for climate action can take many forms: from crowdsourcing of Indigenous knowledge to preserve biodiversity to participatory monitoring of extreme heat and farmer experiments adapting crops to weather variability. By involving people living in places most affected by climate change, these methods have the potential to transform the way we take climate action.

In this project, we’ve partnered with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Accelerator Lab network to understand the potential of collective intelligence design to support climate adaptation or mitigation efforts in the Global South. Our research will map existing practice and identify areas where collective intelligence is currently underused. Alongside, we’ll provide training and mentorship to a small cohort of acceleratorlLabs to fast-track progress on climate action by developing new collective intelligence approaches. We call this our Climate Action Design Studio.

Our research will help funders and decision makers identify emerging areas for investment for climate programmes in the Global South and areas most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. We also hope it will help practitioners understand how they can use collective intelligence design to improve adaptation outcomes together with local communities.

Working with 15 accelerator labs, we hope to test a range of collective intelligence solutions to climate issues from drought and flooding to agricultural adaptation. This might involve working with farmers to measure soil humidity so they can make better decisions about how to manage their crops. Or it could be about crowdmapping new datasets on local hazards, so communities can improve their plans for climate-related extreme weather.

At Nesta’s Centre for Collective Intelligence Design we design tools and projects that allow communities to respond collectively to challenges and that help institutions strengthen trust and collaboration with citizens. When it comes to climate change, we’re committed to developing new approaches that help to involve communities in climate decision making and action. We also want to generate evidence about what works and where more work is needed to understand how to maximise the impact of these methods for climate action.

By all counts, with less than 10 years to go, progress towards the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has not shown the speed or scale of ambition necessary to achieve them. Nowhere is this more evident than our failure to act in the face of climate change.

We’ve been supporting the UNDP’s accelerator labs to work on the SDGs since 2019. Our first Collective Intelligence Design Studio focused on the topic of waste management. It helped demonstrate that a tailored learning programme can help the Labs fast-track impact on a specific topic, while establishing new local partnerships and enabling them to build new skills. This time around, we’re helping the labs to design new prototypes and approaches for better climate action.

Our Climate Action Design Studio is a simple, structured programme that will support 15 accelerator labs over 12 months as they test new ways to combine digital technology and the insights of local communities for climate action. We’re working with teams from Bosnia & Herzegovina, Kenya, Maldives, Mozambique, North Macedonia, South Africa, Togo, Uganda, South Sudan, Sudan, Bolivia, Fiji, Guatemala, Panama and Samoa.

The programme will guide the labs through four different phases:

1) discovery research to identify a local climate challenge

2) developing ideas and testing their value for local stakeholders

3) developing prototypes and piloting new interventions in the community

4) evaluating the impact of their approach for communities and decision makers.

We’ll use a combination of in-person workshops, online learning and expert training. At each stage, the labs will share lessons learned and receive 1:1 mentorship from the Nesta team.

For the research, we’ll analyse case studies from a range of contexts in the Global South. We’ll map this existing practice onto different categories of adaptation and mitigation action and describe the main collective intelligence approaches being used. This will help us understand where and how collective intelligence is already contributing to climate action and where there are gaps. Where available, we’ll also capture evidence of impact and common challenges. Our aim is to identify the most promising opportunities for future R&D and to capture best practice. Any emerging insights will feed into the Design Studio programme.

This project builds on Nesta’s previous work, including the Collective Intelligence Playbook, Using Collective Intelligence to Solve Public Problems, and Collective Intelligence for Sustainable Development: 13 stories from the UNDP Accelerator Labs