In February, local experts from Bratislava and ARCH project partners from TECNALIA and ICLEI met for the first online meeting on the development of the Bratislava Flexible Adaptation Pathway. Bratislava's Flexible Adaptation Pathway is a decision support tool that will build resilience against pluvial flooding in the historical city centre by identifying, prioritizing, and time-ordering various adaptation measures. The aim of this meeting was to explain the approach of the Adaptation Pathway, to present the more concrete goal of the Adaptation Pathway to be developed in the city of Bratislava and to plan the next steps of the joint creation of the Adaptation Pathway for Bratislava, involving local stakeholders in the next months of the project.

In order to raise awareness of the ARCH project among local stakeholders, project partners gave an overview of the project objectives and the consortium. In addition, the climatic context of the city of Bratislava was presented to lay the groundwork and explain the approach for the development of the Adaptation Pathway.

During the session, participants discussed the approach, advantages and possible obstacles for the development of an Adaptation Pathway in Bratislava. It became clear that there needs to be a close connection to the historic area in order to develop a tailor-made Adaptation Pathway. However, this can only be achieved if the views of the ARCH Bratislava team and local stakeholders are included, for example in defining possible areas of intervention for the implementation of different adaptation measures. One participant also pointed out that the Adaptation Pathway can be linked to existing standardised planning, but that the Adaptation Pathway is not a strategic document. Overall, the Adaptation Pathway helps and answers the question of which measures can be implemented where. It is characterised by the fact that it is flexible and can be adapted according to changing priorities or external developments.

In total, nine local stakeholders participated in the online session and provided feedback on the adaptation pathway. The participants had different backgrounds and fields of work, e.g. scientists from different universities, employees of the City of Bratislava and the deputy mayor of a Bratislava municipality were present.

The views of the different local stakeholders are valuable to include in the upcoming three actions, which will also involve external stakeholders. These three actions will address the following questions: what, where, and in what order, and they will take place from March to May 2022 and will be organised by TECNALIA with support from ICLEI. At the end of the session, local stakeholders were asked to fill in a survey to assess which of the upcoming co-creation activities they would like to participate in. The duration and content of the activities will be slightly adapted depending on who and how many local stakeholders want to participate.

This first session on Bratislava's Flexible Adaptation Pathway was a promising start and project partners hope to engage local stakeholders in Bratislava in further co-creation activities in the coming months.