100 citizens representing Catalonia will meet on November 18 in Barcelona to kick off the Catalan climate assembly. This process will be distributed in 6 sessions, 5 face-to-face and 1 online, which will be held on alternate Saturdays until the closing of the assembly on February 10, 2024. 

The objectives of the assembly are to learn, deliberate and reach a consensus on proposals to be submitted to the Government of Catalonia on two key issues: the deployment of renewable energies and the food model of the future. This will be supported by experts from different fields, who will share their knowledge, and by a dynamization team, which will facilitate and provide the necessary support to the participants. 

The selection of the topics has as its starting point a political dilemma, i.e., a problem based on values for which there is no clear answer and where citizen deliberation can shed light and possible solutions. The definition of these dilemmas has been made following the premise of fitting into the political agenda of the Generalitat in order to maximize their impact on future public policies.

The meeting will have a first learning phase, in which relevant information will be shared so that citizens can form their own criteria on both the situation of global climate change and the climate emergency situation in Catalonia. The actions of the Government of Catalonia in this area will also be shared.

The selection of the experts who will provide this knowledge has been made with the intention of obtaining a group that is as balanced as possible, that is, a group that provides balanced information. This implies providing reliable arguments and diverse perspectives that reflect the complexity surrounding the dilemmas, avoiding false or misleading information.

The last three sessions will be devoted to deliberation, the search for solutions and consensus on the recommendations to the Government, which will evaluate and respond to them in order to incorporate them into its public policies. So that, once the Assembly has ended, there will be a return to the members of the Assembly and to the citizens as a whole, accounting for which and how the recommendations have been incorporated, as well as those that have been excluded and their corresponding reasons.

As for the members of the Assembly, the starting point was a population sample of 20,000 people, who were invited to participate in the Assembly. The selection was made by means of a stratified draw with the help of the Institut d'Estadística de Catalunya and Sortition Foundation, to ensure that among the 100 people selected, diverse profiles of Catalan society are represented with respect to gender, age, level of education, territory or origin, as well as an attitudinal question in relation to the urgency of measures on climate change. This will ensure the collection of as many views as possible. 

It is worth highlighting the decisions that have been taken in terms of inclusion of underrepresented groups. When drawing the 20,000 addresses to which a first invitation to join the Assembly was sent, the territory outside the metropolitan area of Barcelona was overrepresented, as well as the foreign population. On the other hand, the second draw (carried out among the volunteers) sought to achieve a sample distributed among three groups with equal weight (⅓ each group): large cities and densely populated areas, medium-sized cities and semi-dense areas, and rural areas.

As defined by the Generalitat on its website dedicated to the process, it is "a unique experience and opportunity to be an active part of a project for the democratic improvement of our country and to participate, beyond voting, in the definition of relevant public policies".

The design of the Assembly is done under the umbrella of the research project Horizons Europe CLIMASresearch project, of which Deliberativa.

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