Center for Climate Adaptation

Nationwide networking platform for the topic of climate adaptation

The web platform is a central point of contact, comprehensive online resource and nationwide networking platform for the topic of climate adaptation in Germany.

Project description

In order to bundle expertise in the field of climate adaptation nationwide, the project partners BMUV (Federal Ministry for the Environment, Nature Conservation, Nuclear Safety and Consumer Protection) commissioned Difu (German Institute of Urban Affairs) and adelphi consult Gmbh founded the "Zentrum KlimaAnpassung" (ZKA). Under the motto "advise, network, shape", this center fills a key position and pilot function in the field of adaptation to current and future challenges at regional and municipal level resulting from the changing climate and its diverse consequences.

The web platform "Zentrum KlimaAnpassung" was designed and implemented as a comprehensive online resource and networking platform.

Project goals and results

The platform is intended to be a nationwide hub for the topic of regional and local climate adaptation in Germany. It offers training, funding and advice and is intended to act as a central guide in this still new and constantly evolving field of topics and activities.

The target groups are primarily municipalities and municipal actors as well as social institutions and their sponsors. However, the platform should also offer added value for many other stakeholders who want to find out more about climate adaptation in Germany, receive advice, receive further training or network.

In addition to information on the topic of climate adaptation in various formats, the platform provides a event calendar with its own offers as well as events from external providers, a wide range of advice and (further) education offers, including in the form of webinars, online consultation hours and several advice channels as well as access-protected areas for exchange and networking. The platform also provides information on news and procedures in the funding landscape.

Challenges

As the operator of the website, the federal government had to adhere to very strict requirements regarding accessibility & GDPR. They have already been reflected in the design and are incorporated into the web theme as well as the content of the website.

Attendance management: very different types of events (online consultation hours, webinars, on-site consultations, networking conferences, etc.) are brought together in a calendar. In the most complex case of an event, an entire conference is mapped with sub-events (sub-events using Entity References and Entity Inline Form). The booking of events was realized with Drupal Webforms, whereby again the complex case (conference with sub-events) is managed by a separate Drupal module. This prevents, for example, certain tracks from being overbooked or someone registering for two events at the same time.

Editor UX: We wanted to provide the team at the Center for Climate Adaptation with a user interface that was as simple and intuitive as possible. In the long term, it should also be possible for team members who join spontaneously to maintain the website without any difficulties or the need for external documentation. We therefore provided all the building blocks available to editors in a sophisticated system of Paragraphs in the Drupal Layout Paragraphs interaction in a customized version of the Gin administration theme and enhanced the whole thing with numerous custom UI improvements and JS support for forms.

The project is once again a good example of how Drupal and Open Source can be supporting pillars for projects with high social relevance (climate crisis and climate adaptation).