The challenge of climate change, a global existential issue, has prompted lively academic discussions and practice. In this context, this research explores the complex connection between urban climate resilience and public engagement by analysing the growing body of literature on participation and participatory platforms used in urban climate resilience projects. Through an examination of scholarly literature and platforms, the present study illustrates the shifting arena of public involvement in climate resilience. The need to empower citizens to participate in city-making, environmental policy-making, and sustainable behaviours is becoming more crucial. Moreover, to overcome the messy problems - limited representation, conflicting stakeholder interests, power imbalances etc. - of urban planning and design processes, public participation plays an important role since it provides increased diversity of perspectives, localised knowledge, improved legitimacy, enhanced decision-making, and increased capacity to implement plans. By encouraging public involvement, governments and institutions can obtain diverse solutions, tackle climate challenges specific to communities, and promote the approval of climate-related policies. Although emerging literature exists on this topic, practical perspectives, in the context of participation platforms, remain open for further investigation and discussion. While these platforms aim to support community engagement, their current methods often result in tokenistic engagement and a failure to empower diverse voices. Herein, this research aims to highlight the numerous examples and formations of public participation in urban climate resilience and discuss its crucial role in shaping a sustainable future through digital platforms that facilitate participation. From this critical view, to map the above-mentioned perspectives, this article will conceptualise the current research and practice agenda of urban climate resilience through the lens of public participation. Positioning itself at the interface of research and practice, this research will evaluate the public participation platforms by decoding platform components and participation methodologies. In doing so, it aims to provide a comprehensive understanding through the analysis of the contemporary ecosystem of participation. Methodologically, the study will employ topic modelling to conduct a systematic literature review by examining the publications from the Web of Science database between 2000 and 2023 and a mapping of current platforms by analysing thematically. This modelling approach applies semantic structures in a text to comprehend unstructured data without the necessity of pre-defined labels or training data. One could argue that this methodology could establish a systematic outlook by deriving from prior studies to contribute new research and practice. With the input from the literature and platform analysis, this research aims to map the design requirements of digital participation platforms towards more inclusive, responsive, and transformative frameworks to improve the efficacy of urban climate resilience studies. Thus, the current state of the art in public participation will be comprised through theoretical and practical approaches.

The accelerated urbanization of Brazilian cities over the last fifty years, coupled with climatic influences, has caused serious impacts on human and natural systems, and is being addressed under the heading of climate change (IPCC, 2014). Mitigation and adaptation measures depend on various policies at different scales, of which the local scale is the most appropriate, as the impacts are observed in the territories. However, the existing climate impact assessment and climate action plan development guides are assigned to large cities, leaving small cities (population between 20 and 100 thousand inhabitants) without specific guidance and methods for developing such a tool adapted to their reality. In general, the thematic secretariats of small towns have limited budgets and a small number of technical staff. The lack of knowledge on the subject among municipal departments and the general public hinders awareness, local debate and the development of public policies. In this context, we present a project that proposed the customization of a method adapted to the reality of small towns in Brazil (but also adaptable to other countries), seeking to overcome the difficulties mentioned above. We also believe that it is essential to involve the population, both in understanding local problems and in choosing and prioritizing the actions that should make up the Participatory Climate Action Plan. The methodology designed was applied in two small towns, one of approximately 20,000 inhabitants, located in the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte and the second, a municipality of approximately 80,000 inhabitants, both in the state of Minas Gerais, southeastern Brazil. Several challenges arose during the process, which required specific strategies to deal with each of them. We can cite, for example, the involvement and interest of the population in the climate issue and the Participatory Climate Action Plan instrument, where we used participatory booklets and workshops; the participation of technicians from different sectors of the public administration in the development of the Plan, especially those sectors whose theme is not directly related to climate impacts; the uniformization of the themes to be discussed (the themes were worked within the designations of Risk Keys and semaphore methods were used to characterize the degree of the problems encountered). In dialogue with these challenges, the project was developed using a participatory and relatively simplified climate impact analysis process, which resulted in an innovative methodology for drawing up a Participatory Climate Action Plan, with the possibility of establishing adaptation and/or mitigation actions, that can be applied by any small Brazilian municipality, regardless of its predominant climate risk.