Despite the fact that municipalities and communities are on the front lines of climate change, they often lack the resources needed to plan and implement effective solutions.
These methodological guides were developed to support local teams by providing practical, participatory, and adaptable tools that link technical assessments with community engagement, as well as with the design and monitoring of climate actions.
These guides were co-designed and tested together with the municipalities of Alto del Carmen, Coquimbo, and San José de Maipo in Chile, and are intended to be replicated and adapted by any local government – be that in Chile, in Latin America or around the world.
These guides are adaptable, designed to be adjusted to the language, context, and reality of each municipality and community.
Each guide offers:
✅ Clear objectives and concrete steps.
✅ Participatory activities and practical examples.
✅ Ready-to-use materials (PPTs, surveys, templates, guides).
✅ Tips for integrating results into Climate Action Plans.
This guide includes eight planning and citizen-participation methodologies for developing climate action plans, with hyperlinks to download the complementary materials associated with each one.
Below, you can download each methodology and its complementary materials separately. Please note that only the complete methodology linked above is available in English.
All supporting materials linked below and individual guides are only available in the original Spanish language version.
This guide provides a step-by-step process for organizing internal workshops that help municipal teams reflect on and improve their community participation practices. The goal is to reflect on the challenges, foster dialogue across different departments, and jointly ideate how to improve community engagement in the development and implementation of climate plans. This methodology is important for strengthening transparency, representativeness, and the quality of local decision-making.
These workshops are a key tool to listen to the community, gather perceptions, and strengthen the implementing team’s knowledge about local climate change and disaster risk issues. Takeaways from the workshops aim to help the team understand relevant hazards, identify exposed elements, recognize perceived impacts, and co-create adaptation measures. The value in this tool lies in integrating local knowledge and diverse voices into the formulation of the PACCC, ensuring fairer and more effective plans.
Interviews make it possible to speak directly with key local stakeholders (community leaders, representatives of productive sectors, local institutions, etc.). They help capture strategic perspectives, experiences, and proposals that do not always emerge in large group settings or surveys. This methodology enriches climate change risk assessments and climate action plans by incorporating direct input from local stakeholders.
Surveys are an agile way to obtain a broad overview of how residents perceive climate change, its risks, and ongoing measures. They help identify vulnerable groups, characterize local trends, and assess attitudes toward climate action. This information is critical to the development of inclusive policies and ensuring decisions are grounded in representative data.
The MRVL system enables measuring progress, impact, and learning from the climate action plans. This methodology begins with the step-by-step process of developing a Theory of Change and a logic framework, and culminates in the construction of a system of monitoring indicators, baselines, targets, and processes to learn from the implementation. Its importance is twofold: it responds to transparency obligations and to requirements outlined in Chile’s Climate Change Framework Law, while it also enables municipalities to learn from the implementation of climate actions and to measure and demonstrate results to the community, partners, and potential funders.
Financing is often one of the main barriers to implementing climate actions. This guide provides a practical framework to coordinate the search for funding, identify sources, build strategies, and access resources. It helps municipalities turn plans into concrete actions towards securing funding while ensuring sustainability and continuity over time.
When there are many proposed measures and limited resources, the prioritization matrix helps the implementation team to organize and make decisions using clear criteria (urgency, feasibility, cost, social and environmental impact). Its importance lies in facilitating participatory, evidence-based decision-making, ensuring that early planning efforts have greater legitimacy and impact.
Climate change and disaster management are deeply connected. This guide proposes a work plan to integrate both areas into municipal planning. In this way, municipalities can strengthen resilience to current and future threats in a coordinated and integrated manner, avoiding duplication and leveraging existing resources and capacities.
