Multi-criteria analysis of ecosystem-based adaptation strategies for flood risk reduction in Irish, Italian, and Turkish Coastal City Living Labs

• Flood and hazard risk reduction strategies require effective stakeholder engagement as part of adaptation planning. • Multi-criteria analysis is a useful decision-support tool which helps contextualise the adaptation-problem and enables co-creation. • Assessing the environmental and socioeconomic co-benefits as well as feasibility of EBA strategies supports their uptake. • EBAs can be replicable, scalable and translatable to climate policy, as is demonstrated through the diversity of the living lab case-study regions and contributions to local climate plans. As 1.8 billion people face the risk of coastal flooding around the world, it has become critical to improve decision-making processes that can inform coastal planning. These pivotal policy-decisions involve selecting optimum adaptation strategies, thereby requiring efficient community engagement to contextualise decision-problems, as top-down approaches alone have not been sufficient in mitigating climate risks thus far. Strategies such as ecosystem-based adaptation (EBA) are becoming increasingly popular due to their cost-effectiveness, easy maintenance, and long-term impacts that help future-proof coastal regions to climate risks. EBA strategies are also gaining confidence amongst local stakeholders not only due to their ability to reduce disaster risk, but improve community resilience through socioeconomic and environmental co-benefits. Despite this, conventional policymaking processes have failed to incorporate stakeholders’ knowledge and needs in climate adaptation efforts, thus affecting the efficiency of these projects. Decision-support tools such as multi-criteria analysis can address this knowledge gap, by providing a platform where stakeholders from diverse societal sections can collaborate to select the most relevant EBA strategies. This research aims to explore the potential of multi-criteria analysis in assessing the utility of EBA strategies for flood risk reduction and offering co-benefits in diverse coastal European regions. Ultimately, this study aims to support the wider uptake of EBAs at policy-level and demonstrate their replicability and scalability across diverse contexts.