2024 Award "Best Practice in Citizen Participation"

FIXCLIMA is an innovative path with a holistic vision combining cross-sectoral competences for the enhancement of social and biocultural assets by involving everyone in the transition as to win the climate challenge you need a whole city. In 2022 Florence was selected in the EU Mission "100 Climate-Neutral and Smart Cities by 2030", in 2023 it approved the Climate City Contract (CCC) and in 2024 it was awarded with the EU Mission label.

To accompany the process and the strategy development to fight climate change, the campaign FIXCLIMA was launched, as a democratic, intergenerational and fair process, included the pilot Citizens Assembly for Climate whose objective is to provide collective recommendations to the City Administration and the community, regarding complex challenges and value dilemmas, such as guidelines for sustainable and intelligent urban planning and just energy transition in a perspective of cohesion and equity.

The 100 members of the Assembly were selected through random sampling to which some conditions were added to give meaningful representation to young people (tomorrow's citizens) and the most vulnerable people, based on climate justice principle, approached through a double interpretation: social and intergenerational.

FIXCLIMA aims to increase awareness on the effects of lifestyles and transform citizens and organizations into active agents of change, by evaluating their perception of public policies and strategies until the co-design of solutions fit for all and building a portfolio of actions to support the Florence ecological transition process.

In 2023 the pilot Assembly led to the identification of 4 flagship projects and the participants suggested to continue the experience in 2024, maintaining the same composition of citizens and city users to have a more temporally significant pilot phase and to focus on priorities emerged in 2023. Some people underlined the importance of transforming the Assembly into a permanent instrument.

The democratic process is going on in 2024, consolidating the dialogue, widening the audience and the portfolio of planned decarbonization actions, involving also high schools and students as future users of city services and ambassadors.

Through FIXCLIMA, we shaped a new participatory model linked to a long-term process (zero emission city by 2030) and the pilot test of climate assembly - following the approval of a motion providing for the institutionalization of the Permanent Climate Assembly.

• https://firenzeperilclima.it (External link)