Windows of opportunity: addressing climate uncertainty through adaptation plan implementation (original) (raw)
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Planningfor Climate Change Adaptation in Urban Areas
The Adaptive Challenge of Climate Change
This article aims to gain insight into the governance capacity of cities to adapt to climate change through urban green planning, which we will refer to as climate-greening. The use of green space is considered a no-regrets adaptation strategy, since it not only absorbs rainfall and moderates temperature, but simultaneously can contribute to the sustainable development of urban areas. However, green space competes with other socioeconomic interests that also require space. Urban planning can mediate among competing demands for land use, and, as such, is potentially useful for the governance of adaptation. Through an in-depth case study of three frontrunners in adaptation planning (London, Rotterdam, and Toronto), the governance capacity for climate-greening urban areas is analysed and compared. The framework we have developed utilizes five sub-capacities: legal, managerial, political, resource, and learning. The overall conclusion from the case studies is that the legal and political subcapacities are the strongest. The resource and learning sub-capacities are relatively weak, but offer considerable growth potential. The managerial sub-capacity is constrained by compartmentalization and institutional fragmentation, two key barriers to governance capacity. These are effectively blocking the mainstreaming of adaptation in urban planning. The biggest opportunities to enhance governance capacity lie in the integration of adaptation considerations into urban-planning processes, the establishment of links between adaptation and mitigation policies, investment in training programmes for staff and stakeholders in adaptation planning, and providing infrastructure for learning processes. * The authors would like to thank the journal's anonymous referees for their valuable comments, the respondents for their valuable input, and Clare Barnes for the English-language check. The authors may be contacted at Environmental Governance,
Cityscape 2010). Resiliency is the ability of a community or society, along with the biophysical systems on which they depend, to resist or absorb the impacts (deaths, damage, losses, and so on) of hazards, rapidly recover from those impacts and reduce future vulnerabilities through adaptive strategies (Chapin III et al., 2009; Peacock et al., 2008). A local plan can play a pivotal role in making a community more resilient by guiding how a community anticipates and responds to climate-change risks to people and property (Shuford, Rynne, and Mueller, 2010). By steering urban growth away from flood hazard areas, either current or forecast because of increased sea levels and more intense precipitation events, planning programs significantly reduce the possibility of major loss. For existing development in increasingly hazardous areas, planning programs help property owners relocate structures to safer sites, or elevate and strengthen those structures. Planning controls and land acquisition programs can play key roles in protecting ecosystems that build community resiliency to climate change. The process of creating a plan directly addresses the core characteristics of public risks that inhibit proactive, near-term, individual action. In a study of 60 planmaking processes associated with natural hazard risk reduction, Burby (2003) found that planners motivate broader involvement by directly engaging more groups and by providing public forums for increasing awareness and understanding that public risks are mass-produced and shared problems. Such collaborative efforts expand the choices and opportunities to codevelop risk-reduction strategies. Generating the information base as part of the planning process makes future risks seem more tangible. For example, in the process of modifying a floodplain map to account for sea-level rise forecasts, participants can see how climate impacts are relevant to their community, neighborhood, or home and how those impacts are similar to and different from the risks they face today. A planning process that integrates information generation with public engagement also expands prospects for seeking new opportunities to produce co-benefits that have a positive effect on multiple interests rather than having narrowly defined benefits that suit individual interests. Protection of greenway corridors along waterways subject to rain-induced flooding exacerbated by climate change offers co-benefits by preserving flood-prone areas that might otherwise experience urban development (Younger et al., 2008). It can also provide alternatives for biking and walking that reduce automobile use and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and improve opportunities for physical activities that yield public health benefits. Previous research on the production of co-benefits revealed that information sharing raises knowledge about the sometimes unrecognized benefits (and costs) of household, business, and public-sector activities, which incentivizes an expansion in the number of participants who might not otherwise be involved and increases their acceptance of the need to act differently (Ostrom, 2010). Recent studies indicated that, where strong plans have been adopted, they have fostered more robust local government actions aimed at reducing the public risks posed by climate changeinduced natural hazards, including hurricane surge and inland flooding (Berke et al., 2006; Burby, 2006). Plans will likely be weakened and sparingly implemented, however, because of a set of climate-change challenges. What follows is a review of these challenges and observations about the application of strategies derived from the collaborative and anticipatory governance planning theories for inducing local action.
Quality of urban climate adaptation plans over time
npj Urban Sustainability
Defining and measuring progress in adaptation are important questions for climate adaptation science, policy, and practice. Here, we assess the progress of urban adaptation planning in 327 European cities between 2005 and 2020 using three ‘ADAptation plan Quality Assessment’ indices, called ADAQA-1/ 2/ 3, that combine six plan quality principles. Half of the cities have an adaptation plan and its quality significantly increased over time. However, generally, plan quality is still low in many cities. Participation and monitoring and evaluation are particularly weak aspects in urban adaptation policy, together with plan ‘consistency’. Consistency connects impacts and vulnerabilities with adaptation goals, planned measures, actions, monitoring and evaluation, and participation processes. Consistency is a key factor in the overall quality of plans. To help evaluate the quality of plans and policies and promote learning, we suggest incorporating our ADAptation plan Quality Assessment ind...
Incorporating climate change adaptation into local plans
Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 2014
Local governments can encourage proactive action on climate change by incorporating adaptation measures into long-term planning documents. The authors undertook action-oriented, case study research by participating (as adaptation experts) in the process to create a sustainability and land use policy plan for the City of Prince George, Canada. A range of adaptation measures was incorporated into both documents. Factors enabling the incorporation of adaptation included a high level of local awareness, an existing adaptation strategy to draw upon and the flexible process used to create the plans. Challenges such as a lack of priority, limited policy direction and perceptions of climate change as solely an environmental challenge persist as barriers to incorporating adaptation into local plans, particularly in smaller centres.
Adapting to climate change through local municipal planning: barriers and challenges
Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 2011
Municipal planning represents a key avenue for local adaptation, but is subject to recognised constraints. To date, these constraints have focused on simplistic factors such as limited resources and lack of information. In this paper we argue that this focus has obscured a wider set of constraints which need to be acknowledged and addressed if adaptation is likely to advance through municipal planning. Although these recognised constraints are relevant, we argue that what underpins these issues are more fundamental challenges affecting local, placed-based planning by drawing on the related field of community-based environmental planning (CBEP). In considering a wider set of constraints to practical attempts towards adaptation, the paper considers planning based on a case study of three municipalities in Sydney, Australia in 2008. The results demonstrate that climate adaptation was widely accepted as an important issue for planning conducted by local governments. However, it was yet to be embedded in planning practice which retained a strong mitigation bias in relation to climate change. In considering the case study, we draw attention to factors thus far under-acknowledged in the climate adaptation literature. These include leadership, institutional context and competing planning agendas. These factors can serve as constraints or enabling mechanisms for achieving climate adaptation depending upon how they are exploited in any given situation. The paper concludes that, through addressing these issues, local, place-based planning can play a greater role in achieving climate adaptation.
Climbing the Adaptation Planning Ladder: Barriers and Enablers in Municipal Planning
Handbook of Climate Change Adaptation, 2014
Local municipal governments have a crucial role in helping communities adapt to climate change. Recognizing different levels of climate preparedness, this chapter analyzes what steps communities tend to follow when they move forward on climate adaptation, including prerequisites for planning and the selection of policies. Drawing on content analyses of local climate adaptation plans from the United States (US) and
Climate change adaptation planning in large cities: A systematic global assessment
A B S T R A C T Cities globally face significant risks from climate change, and are taking an increasingly active role in formulating and implementing climate change adaptation policy. However, there are few, if any, global assessments of adaptation taking place across cities. This study develops and applies a framework to track urban climate change adaptation policy using municipal adaptation reporting. From 401 local governments globally in urban areas with >1 m people, we find that only 61 cities (15%) report any adaptation initiatives, and 73 cities (18%) report on planning towards adaptation policy. We classified cities based on their adaptation reporting as extensive adaptors, moderate adaptors, early stage adaptors, and non-reporting. With few exceptions, extensive adaptors are large cities located in high-income countries in North America, Europe, and Oceania, and are adapting to a variety of expected impacts. Moderate adaptors usually address general disaster risk reduction rather than specific impacts, and are located in a mix of developed and developing countries. Early stage adaptors exhibit evidence of planning for adaptation, but do not report any initiatives. Our findings suggest that urban adaptation is in the early stages, but there are still substantive examples of governments taking leadership regardless of wealth levels and institutional barriers.
Understanding barriers and opportunities for adaptation planning in cities
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This paper analyzes barriers and opportunities for effective adaptation planning in cities. In particular, we focus on the preparation and adoption of adaptation strategies and action plans by urban planners. To guide the discussion, we develop a two-tier framework of variables influencing decision-making, which is based on bounded rationality. We argue that whether or not urban planners take action to foster adaptation to climate change depends on three first-tier variables: information, incentives and resources. In addition, we point out that each of these variables may itself be a function of a set of underlying second-tier variables, including the natural and socio-economic environment, actor-specific characteristics of the decision-maker, and the institutional environment. Within this framework, we specify barriers and opportunities for effective adaptation planning as hampering or promoting characteristics of these first- and second-tier variables. We apply and test the framew...