Climate change adaptation: Strategic planning and urban design practice (original) (raw)
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Evidence-based strategies in this publication demonstrate how integrating climate science, natural systems, compact urban form and functions configure dynamic, desirable and healthy communities. The scholarship contends that confronting the challenges of a rapidly urbanizing world threatened by climate change requires expanding on the traditional influence and capabilities of urban planning and urban design. The chapter bridges science and urban design practice through a suite of climate change urban form and function strategies in response to climate mitigation and adaptation. These include (a) reducing waste heat and greenhouse gas emissions through energy efficiency, transit access and walkability; (b) modifying form and layout of buildings and urban districts; (c) use of heat-resistant construction materials and reflective surface coatings; and (d) increasing vegetative cover. The confluence of research and operational application in this scholarship is providing a blueprint for how to convincingly configure sustainable and climate-resilient urban districts. Illustrative diagrams of these strategies and design processes are core elements within the chapter. Coordinating Lead Author: Jeffrey Raven
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Global climate change presents deep and complex impacts to world cities requiring effective adaptation measures to be incorporated into the urban planning systems. As part of this study, five global cities namely New York City in North America, Cape Town in Africa, Tokyo in Asia, Sydney in Australia, and Oslo in Europe are explored to understand the best practices in climate change adaptation. All the case studies demonstrate specific strategies that are relevant to the climate challenges of a particular region, including sea-level rise, water shortage, natural catastrophes, wildfires, and flash floods. These include green infrastructure, WSUD, disaster preparedness plans, and community engagement programs. The insights thus point to the need for context-sensitive approaches that combine technology, policy, and community engagement to enhance urban resilience. These findings are valuable for policymakers and urban planners to identify ways to build climate-change-resilient cities in the context of emerging environmental concerns and global climate change.
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Nature-based solutions offer an exciting prospect for resilience building and advancing urban planning to address complex urban challenges simultaneously. In this article, we formulated through a coproduction process in workshops held during the first IPCC Cities and Climate Science Conference in Edmonton, Canada, in March 2018, a series of synthesis statements on the role, potential, and research gaps of nature-based solutions for climate adaptation and mitigation. We address interlocking questions about the evidence and knowledge needed for integrating nature-based solutions into urban agendas. We elaborate on the ways to advance the planning and knowledge agenda for nature-based solutions by focusing on knowledge coproduction, indicators and big data, and novel financing models. With this article, we intend to open a wider discussion on how cities can effectively mainstream nature-based solutions to mitigate and adapt to the negative effects of climate change and the future role of urban science in coproducing nature-based solutions.
Planningfor Climate Change Adaptation in Urban Areas
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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,
Climate Science Integration and Urban Planning: A Climate Change Adaptation Exegesis
It is increasingly acknowledged in the adaptation to climate change literature that factors such as climate science play a large role when adaptation strategies are either chosen or rejected at a local scale. Regrettably, the discussion of climate science integration has tended to focus on mitigation decisions taken at international and national levels. This has limited our own thinking and understanding of the hurdles and promises that climate science integration presents at the local scale. This analysis distills existing literature on the subject. Based on such a review, it identifies the optimal level at which adaptation decisions should be taken and deciphers some of the most important factors that would cement the integration of climate science with urban planning under climate change scenario. The analysis argues that the selection of proactive, planned adaptation measures in response to climate change would certainly require a city based strategy that taps on glocalized climate science transcending on all levels of planning including settlement, neighbourhood and building scales. Achieving this, would require a much more elevated role of urban planning and the removal of all obstacles to effective adaptation that currently characterize most climate change initiatives.
This book series Theory and Practice of Urban Sustainability Transitions is intended to explore the different dynamics, challenges, and breakthroughs in accelerating sustainability transitions in urban areas across the globe. We expect to find as much different and diverse stories, visions, experiments, and creative actors as there are cities: from metropolises to country towns, from inner city districts to suburbs, from developed to developing, from monocultural to diverse, and from hierarchical to egalitarian. But we also expect to find patterns in processes and dynamics of transitions across this diversity. Transition dynamics include locked-in regimes that are challenged by changing contexts, ecological stress and societal pressure for change as well as experiments and innovations in niches driven by entrepreneurial networks, and creative communities and proactive administrators. But also included are resistance by vested interests and sunken costs, uncertainties about the future amongst urban populations, political instabilities, and the erosion of social services and systems of provision. And finally there are the forming of transformative arenas, the development of coalitions for change across different actor groups, the diffusion and adoption of new practices, and exponential growth of sustainable technologies. For this series we seek this middle ground: between urban and transition perspectives, between conceptual and empirical, and between structural and practical. We aim to develop this series to offer scholars state-of-the-art theoretical developments applied to the context of cities. Equally important is that we offer urban planners, professionals, and practitioners interested or engaged in strategic interventions to accelerate and guide urban sustainability transition frameworks for understanding and dealing with on-going developments, methods, and instruments. This book series will lead to new insights into how cities address the sustainability challenges they face by not returning to old patterns but by searching for new and innovative methods and instruments that are based on shared principles of a transitions approach. Based on concrete experiences, state-of-the-art research, and ongoing practices, the series provides rich insights, concrete and inspiring cases as well as practical methods, tools, theories, and recommendations. The book series, informed by transition thinking as it was developed in the last decade in Europe, aims to describe, analyse, and support the quest of cities around the globe to accelerate and stimulate such a transition to sustainability.
Planning for climate change in urban areas: from theory to practice
Journal of Cleaner Production, 2013
Climate change poses a serious threat to sustainable urban development, placing many cities at risk. Consequently, city authorities face the challenge of finding ways to include adaptation strategies into their work, although related knowledge and competence is still scarce and fragmented. With the aim of contributing to knowledge development and organizational learning, the objective of this paper is to critically review and compare current theoretical and practical approaches to adaptation planning in cities. First the conceptual characteristics and features of a climate-resilient city are identified. Second, the reciprocal linkages between climate-related disasters, urban form and city planning processes are analysedby taking into account the life cycle of disasters from causes, to short-and long-term impacts, and post-disaster response and recovery. Finally, urban adaptation measures proposed for both developed and so-called developing countries are assessed. On the basis of the differences, gaps and synergies identified between theoretical and practical approaches to adaptation planning, the implications for improving sustainable urban transformation are discussed.