We examine why implementing climate aims has proven challenging for municipalities. Recognising that climate policy research identifies ‘barriers’ to the forward motion of environmental knowledge, we use STS tools to dismantle ‘barrier thinking’ and analyse the dynamics of climate knowledge in municipal organisations. The primary data are 21 interviews with climate change and risk management experts in Finnish municipalities. We employ the idea of ‘trials of strength’ to analyse not mere barriers but gatherings, translations, and implementations of environmental knowledge. We argue that four kinds of trials are crucial in transforming climate knowledge so it can cohere with ongoing processes: it is gathered and condensed at the organisation’s borders; climate experts embody and transmit the knowledge; meeting tables form obligatory passage points for its implementation; and road maps draw actors together to circulate it. While traveling around municipal organisations, climate knowledge is often sidetracked but can sometimes become unexpectedly effective.

Cities are crucially but problematically positioned to take on the climate crisis. Although local governance seems an appropriate scale for adaptation and mitigation measures, numerous barriers to implementing them effectively have been diagnosed. We argue that a focus on pinpointable barriers neglects the intrinsic organisational dynamics that often impede effective climate action. Drawing on interviews with climate specialists in Finnish municipalities, we engage with local governance practices and study how the interviewees experience and negotiate the complexities of climate work. Using Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, we find that municipalities treat climate issues as auxiliary concerns and subsume them as separate, precarious projects. The various and conflicting rhythms that constitute the relations of organisational practices leave climate and environmental experts in a contentious state. They must not only endure constant sidelining by the core functions of their organisations but also devise strategies to keep climate issues on the agenda. We suggest that organisational practices are constituted by diverging and often conflictual rhythms. Analysing their expressions in everyday climate work, we show how a composed functioning of municipal organisations serves to persistently defer a change of pace towards achieving ambitious climate goals.

Climate change adaptation actions are vital in cities to prepare and adapt to advancing climate change, especially rapidly changing probabilities of extreme weather events. Although especially in Europe many cities have generated adaptation and climate risk management plans and improved decision-support also with respect to weather and climate risks, there is still much to do. Often, risk management actions are strongly activated only after experiencing negative impacts, for example, related to a severe flood causing substantial damages or even losses of lives. In a perfect world, however, in risk management all potential risks should be considered already beforehand, and either adapt to them or at least acknowledge these possible risks. To support the Finnish cities’ preparedness for possible, yet not previously observed extreme weather events, the project LONGRISK designed a decision platform for strategic risk management, which generated an extensive dialogue between decision-makers and experts in three Finnish pilot cities (Helsinki, Tampere, Kotka). One of the main objectives of the project was to generate a “climate risk monitoring Dashboard” that demonstrates possible near-future extreme weather episodes and their impacts. More specifically, the Dashboard consisted of the synthetic reposition of the Copenhagen 2011 extreme cloudburst over each pilot city including the simulated flood impacts. The Dashboard was a key tool in persuading city policymakers representing also the highest decision level (e.g. the Mayor) to engage in a Situation Room exercise, i.e., an internal dialogue especially on the possible gaps in their present adaptation level and chain of communication and decision-making. As a result, and especially due to the intensive internal dialogue, the decision-makers recognized their main vulnerabilities and weaknesses and generated a list of action items for further development. This study presents the overall procedure of generating the Dashboard and running the Situation Rooms. Also, we present the method for generating the synthetic extreme weather events, such as the repositioned Copenhagen cloudburst and related urban flood simulations that are congruent with the climatological statistics and with CMIP6 climate projections.