Mindset Changes for Dealing with Complex Climate Impacts - Experiences with a Tool from Courses on Digitalization and Climate-Adapted Urban Development

Abstract

Economy and society are currently exposed to multi-layered multi-crises. Against the backdrop of the covid pandemic, a growing shortage of skilled workers, increasing armed conflicts or persistent refugee flows, cities and municipalities in particular have to deal with resulting local impacts. Parallel to these highly dynamic crisis events, cities and municipalities continue to be called upon to face the now established challenges of climate change, sustainability and digitalization. More and more, there are organizational and also psychological overloads in coping with everyday tasks as a result of increasing complexities. Because of the excessive demands, there is a retreat to familiar and routine-related everyday work and the neglect of the search for adequate solutions to the increasingly complex problems. Especially in the field of municipal infrastructure, which requires rapid and comprehensive adaptation to the manifold impacts of climate change, this excessive demand increasingly leads to recourse to rather simple solutions, which, however, do not justice to the complexity of the situation. During two certificate courses at Hof University of Applied Sciences (Germany) on the development of climate-adapted urban planning and on successful digitalization in municipal water management, a novel tool for dealing with complex situations was developed to practice on examples. It was observed among the approximately 70 participants in both courses that used this method two to three times already led to a visible change in the perception and assessment of complex situations, without the need for psychologically accompanied training of change behavior.