Living Lab Rijnland brings stakeholders together and identifies user stories

Since our last update in November 2022, the Rijnland Living Lab, together with Water Authority Rijnland, has made great progress in co-creating a climate service with representatives from agriculture and water recreation sectors. 

Earlier stakeholder workshops/meetings were mono-discipline oriented, but since November, we have chosen a multi-discipline approach where the representatives from the agriculture sector and the water recreation sector participate in workshops together. This was an important step, as these sectors have been identified to have differing interests during droughts. For example, during drought the supply of fresh water is essential to the agricultural sector, however, this (amongst other factors) can be affected by the opening and closing of sluice gates, which is essential for water recreation.

The first multi-sector workshop was held in December 2022 to identify and discuss stakeholder user stories. Here each stakeholder was asked to write down their climate information needs and how this information would help them make decisions to deal with (future) climate challenges. This was a highly interactive process, in which not only Living Lab Rijnland learned from stakeholders, but stakeholders also learned from each other.

After this workshop, a meeting was organised in March 2023 to summarise all that has been discussed so far and fine tune the user stories. This was also done to ensure that everyone has had their voice heard and has been understood. This is a crucial part of the co-creation process, and to ensure that the developed climate service will be useful to stakeholders.

During this meeting, the deputy project coordinator Ilyas Masih informed the Rijnland stakeholders of our progress in Living Labs outside of the Netherlands to create connections between climate service needs. 

Now that the contours of the desired climate service are in view, we are excited to start the process of selecting and designing the components of the climate service.