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Ongoing climate change is increasing summertime temperatures, and frequency and intensity of heatwaves in Europe, which can threaten human health. Relatively little is known about how quickly outdoor heat penetrates into residences during heatwaves. Long-term and systematic networks recording indoor temperatures are challenging to install and maintain, and therefore scarce. We first report on crowdsourced indoor air temperature data in residences in Amsterdam (The Netherlands) during a heatwave event in September 2023. These data complement professional long-term indoor air temperature observations in 92 houses in Amsterdam. Second, we document the lessons learnt in the design and execution of this citizen science activity. 571 indoor temperature records were collected through the citizen science crowdsourcing approach, with a median value of 28.0 °C on the warmest day in the study period, while outdoor mean minimum and maximum temperatures reached 20.6 °C and 31.1 °C respectively. The results indicate that the crowdsourcing approach reports temperatures that are significantly higher than the professional approach, which supports the need for professional indoor networks. Finally, local media attention was critical in reaching a wide audience.

Citizen priorities, needs, and rights have been moving to the centre of ‘good’ risk management and governance in theory, but what is their role in practice? The disastrous impacts of the flooding event across western Europe in 2021 highlighted many gaps and challenges in flood risk governance (FRG) structures in Germany. To better understand these, this study explored responsibilities as perceived by citizens and compares these with legal-institutional social contracts. These perceptions of citizens were captured in an online survey in the affected regions. The results indicate that German FRG remains a predominantly top-down system with citizens being dependent on the functioning of the risk and emergency system. The results of the survey highlight the need for: 1) clarifying and co-defining roles and responsibilities in FRG and making them more transparent; 2) enhancing citizen active involvement in governance and deliberating interactions; 3) rebuilding trust; and 4) creating joint responsibilities between citizens and local authorities. Based on the findings of the study, it became apparent that research on citizen centred FRG is steps ahead of policy and practice. To enhance policy and practice, recommendations were developed to foster collaboration between citizens and local authorities to strengthen local FRG.

The international community, particularly across the European Union (EU), is increasingly recognizing and promoting Nature-based Solutions (NBS) as long-term and sustainable measures against hydro-meteorological hazards such as flooding, coastal erosion, heat waves and landslides. Yet, scaled implementation of NBS at EU and global level presently remains a challenge due to often complex and lengthy permitting procedures. While efforts have been made to highlight the explicit and implicit role of NBS in major global and European policy frameworks, uncertainty remains when it comes to the level of coherence across government levels, from international to national and local scale. This paper attempts to address this gap by introducing an open-access online policy catalogue pertaining to the implementation of 740 NBS projects globally to mitigate the impact of hydro-meteorological phenomena. Based on a policy screening of 88 NBS projects in Europe and an in-depth analysis of the NBS permitting paths across seven Open-Air Laboratories in European countries, we examine the linkages between European and national legislation and policies. Understanding these linkages will help promote NBS mainstreaming as the NBS agenda is set at EU and global level while implementation is heavily dependent on national-scale governance. We identify a common permitting path for NBS paved by the EU in several directives, as well as some divergence in the implementation of these directives at national level which can pose significant challenges to the uptake of NBS. The NBS policy catalogue provides a valuable resource for further analysis of the NBS policy context from local to global levels towards increasing uptake and acceptance of NBS in Europe and beyond.

Flooding events, like in Germany in 2021, highlight the need for re-naturalising banks of rivers and streams to naturally mitigate future flooding. To identify potential areas for Nature-Based Solutions (NBS), the NBS Toolkit—a decision-support tool for Europe—was developed within the H2020 OPERANDUM project. The tool builds on suitability mapping, which is progressively adopted for pre-assessing areas for Nature-Based Solutions. The NBS Toolkit operates with European open-source data, which is available at different spatial resolutions. In this study, we performed a GIS-based analysis to examine the impact of different resolution data on the resulting suitability maps. The results suggest that for large-scale measures such as riparian forest buffers, coarser resolutions are sufficient and may save processing time and capacities. However, fine resolution datasets can bring added value to urban suitability mapping and are of greater importance for small-scale, local Nature-Based Solutions.