Ghent aims at realizing more green areas in response to climate change and actively seeks citizen involvement to achieve this. This is in line with the city being very social and creative with many citizens actively developing bottom-up initiatives. Many of these small scale projects however have difficulty developing into a successful project through the available financing mechanisms. Therefore, Ghent has developed a crowdfunding platform that allows citizens to propose and finance their ideas for the city.

Today, two projects addressing climate adaptation have been successfully realized with support of the crowdfunding.gent platform; one project encouraging urban farming and the other realising edible streets. The projects might seem small when it comes to addressing climate change challenges. However, the crowdfunding platform is found to be an excellent instrument to realise small ‘drops’ of climate adaptation measures that have the opportunity to generate larger ripple effects.