Climate Adaptation Center
The web platform is a central point of contact, comprehensive online resource, and nationwide networking platform for climate adaptation in Germany.
In order to pool expertise in the field of climate adaptation nationwide, the project partners Difu (German Institute for Urban Studies) and adelphi consult GmbH founded the “Climate Adaptation Center” (ZKA) on behalf of the BMUV (Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety, and Consumer Protection). Under the motto “advise, network, shape,” it plays a key role and acts as a guide in the field of adaptation to current and future challenges at the regional and municipal level resulting from climate change and its manifold consequences.
The “Climate Adaptation Center” web platform was designed and implemented as a comprehensive online resource and networking platform.
Goals
The platform is intended to be a nationwide hub for regional and local climate adaptation in Germany. It offers training, funding, and consulting services and is intended to play a central guiding role in this still new and constantly evolving field of activity.
The target groups are primarily municipalities and municipal actors, as well as social institutions and their sponsors. However, the platform is also intended to offer added value to many other actors who want to obtain information, advice, training, or networking opportunities on the topic of climate adaptation in Germany.
In addition to information on climate adaptation in various formats, the platform provides a calendar of events with its own offerings as well as events from external providers, a wide range of consulting and training services in the form of webinars, online consultation hours, and several consulting channels, as well as access-protected areas for exchange and networking. At the same time, the platform provides information on news and procedures in the funding landscape.
Challenges
As the operator of the website, the federal government had to comply with very strict accessibility and GDPR requirements. These have already been incorporated into the design and are reflected in the web theme and content of the website.
Participation Management: very different types of events (online consultation hours, webinars, on-site consultations, networking conferences, etc.) are brought together in one calendar. In the most complex case of an event, an entire conference with sub-events is mapped (sub-events using entity references and entity inline form). Event booking was implemented using web forms, with the complex case (conference with sub-events) being managed by a separate module. This prevents, for example, certain tracks from being overbooked or someone from registering for two events at the same time.
Editor UX: We wanted to provide the Climate Adaptation Center team with a user interface that was as simple and intuitive as possible. In the long term, it should be possible for new team members to maintain the website without difficulty or the need for external documentation. We therefore made all the building blocks available to editors in a sophisticated system of paragraphs in conjunction with layout paragraphs in a customized version of the Gin administration theme, and enhanced the whole thing with numerous UI improvements and JS support for forms.
Conclusion
adelphi is Europe's leading independent think-and-do tank for climate, environment, and development and also relies on Drupal for many projects. In addition, the project is once again a good example of how Drupal and open source can be key pillars in projects with high social relevance (climate crisis and climate adaptation).
