Paper Title
Developing Strategies by Integrating Mitigation, Adaptation and Participation to Climate Change Risks: Distender EU Project

Abstract
Distender is an EU-funded 42-month project to develop a methodological framework that guide the integration of climate change (CC) adaptation and mitigation strategies through participatory approaches in ways that respond to the impacts and risks of CC, supported by quantitative and qualitative analysis that facilitates the understanding of interactions, synergies and trade-offs. Holistic approaches to mitigation and adaptation must be tailored to the context-specific situation and this requires a flexible and participatory planning process to ensure legitimate and salient action, carried out by all important stakeholders. DISTENDER will develop a set of multi-driver qualitative and quantitative socio-economic-climate scenarios through a facilitated participatory process that integrates bottom-up knowledge and locally-relevant drivers with top-down information from the global climate models (CMIP6) and European Shared Socioeconomic Pathways (SSPs). A cross-sectorial and multi-scale impact assessment modelling toolkit will be developed to analyse the complex interactions over multiple sectors, including an economic evaluation framework. The economic impact of the different efforts will be analyse, including damage claim settlement and how do sectoral activity patterns change under various scenarios considering indirect and cascading effects. DISTENDER will follow a pragmatic approach applying methodologies and toolkits across six Case Studies of national, regional and urban scale: Austria, Northeast of The Netherland, South-West Iberian Peninsula, Guimaraes, Gdansk and Metropolitan City of Turin and five additional Follower Case Studies are first in line for replication.The knowledge generated by DISTENDER will be offered by a Decision Support System (DSS) which will help policy makers to take the most out of the knowledge, tools and recommendations generated by DISTENDER and further replicate them. Keywords - Climate Change, Adaptation, Mitigation, Risks