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Purpose As policy makers address the issue of climate adaptation, they are confronted with climate-specific barriers: a long-term horizon and a high degree of uncertainty. These barriers also hamper the development of spatial planning for climate adaptation. So how can spatial planners encompass these barriers and steer the general debate on climate adaptation? The paper aims to discuss these issues. Design/methodology/approach This research analyzes the strengths and weaknesses of an international design workshop on climate adaptation, and drought issues in particular. Design workshops are originally an educational setting but they are increasingly employed as a tool to explore alternative futures on a complex, real-life design problem. The case study illustrates how climate-specific barriers emerged throughout the design workshop and clarifies how they were encompassed by the participating design students. Findings The research clarifies the added value of a design workshop on climate adaptation. The paper highlights specific promising characteristics of the design workshop: the visualization of future adaptation challenges and the current water system, the focus on a regional project instead of sectoral adjustments and the integration of the adaptation challenge with other socio-economic goals. In the case study Flanders, however, the necessary participation of climate experts and policy makers of other domains proved challenging. Originality/value The paper argues that a design workshop has the potential to enrich the debate and policy work on climate adaptation. In many countries with low-planning tradition, however, additional tools are needed to help set the “adaptation agenda.”

As global warming persists, regions with moderate climatic conditions will be confronted with exacerbating seasonal variations, including aggravating dry periods. This upcoming drought challenge receives, however, little attention by policy makers. Likewise, Flemish planners and designers focus on floods, not droughts. This research concentrates on design strategies to deal with a lack of water in highly urbanised territories such as Flanders. The article analyses the results of a design workshop on (future) drought issues in the Campine region; Shifting Climate, Reshaping Urban Landscapes. Four distinct strategies are delineated: 'remodeling the valleys', 'retrofitting urbanisation', 'aqueducts 2.0' and 'autonomous, local water networks'. The article discusses the premise of each strategy and its approach to the local landscape and urban tissue. Moreover, it highlights key issues to drought design in highly urbanised territories. Drought, a forgotten climate challengeClimate change is widely recognized as a key issue of the twenty-first century. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) warns global warming will cause multiple droughts; meteorological droughts agricultural droughts, hydrological droughts and water supplies under pressure (Jiménez Cisneros et al. 2014). Accordingly, territories must be prepared for an increasing lack of water. In water scarce regions climate change will aggravate current drought issues.

The mapping of cultural ecosystem services through online public participation GIS (PPGIS) has predominantly relied on geographic entities, such as points and polygons, to collect spatial data, regardless of their limitations. As the potential of online PPGIS to support planning and design keeps growing, so does the need for more knowledge about data quality and suitable geographic entities to collect data. Using the online PPGIS tool, "My Green Place," 449 respondents mapped cultural ecosystem services in Ghent by using all three geographic entities: point, polygon, and the novel "marker." The three geographic entities' accuracy was analyzed through a quadrat analysis, regressions against the collective truth, the Akaike information criterion, and a preference test based on the survey's outcomes. The results show that the point reflects the weakest the collective truth, especially for mapping dynamic cultural practices, and the marker reflects it the strongest. The polygon's performance compares to that of the marker's, albeit slightly weaker. The marker delivers a more nuanced image of the respondents' input, is simpler to use, and has less risk of spatial errors. Therefore, we suggest using the marker instead of the point and the polygon when collecting spatial data in future cultural ecosystem services research.

Due to climate change and risk of sea level rise, agriculture in coastal areas is under pressure. Soil salinisation has already led to the degradation of millions of hectares of farmland worldwide, a potential threat to food security.Farmers in the North Sea Region also experience increasing salinisation on their