Adaptive urban governance: new challenges for the second generation of urban adaptation strategies to climate change

The task of adapting cities to the impacts of climate change is of great importance—urban areas are hotspots of high risk given their concentrations of population and infrastructure; their key roles for larger economic, political and social processes; and their inherent instabilities and vulnerabilities. Yet, the discourse on urban climate change adaptation has only recently gained momentum in the political and scientific arena. This paper reviews the recent climate change adaptation strategies of nine selected cities and analyzes them in terms of overall vision and goals, baseline information used, direct and indirect impacts, proposed structural and non-structural measures, and involvement of formal and informal actors. Against this background, adaptation strategies and challenges in two Vietnamese cities are analyzed in detail, namely Ho Chi Minh City and Can Tho. The paper thereby combines a review of formalized city-scale adaptation strategies with an empirical analysis of actual adaptation measures and constraints at household level. By means of this interlinked and comparative analysis approach, the paper explores the achievements, as well as the shortcomings, in current adaptation approaches, and generates core issues and key questions for future initiatives in the four sub-categories of: (1) knowledge, perspectives, uncertainties and key threats; (2) characteristics of concrete adaptation measures and processes; (3) interactions and conflicts between different strategies and measures; (4) limits of adaptation and tipping points. In conclusion, the paper calls for new forms of adaptive urban governance that go beyond the conventional notions of urban (adaptation) planning. The proposed concept underlines the need for a paradigm shift to move from the dominant focus on the adjustment of physical structures towards the improvement of planning tools and governance processes and structures themselves. It addresses in particular the necessity to link different temporal and spatial scales in adaptation strategies, to acknowledge and to mediate between different types of knowledge (expert and local knowledge), and to achieve improved integration of different types of measures, tools and norm systems (in particular between formal and informal approaches).     

Toward sustainable adaptation to future climate change: insights from vulnerability and resilience approaches analyzing agrarian system of Iran

There is no certainty that adaptation to climate change is sustainable, and new approaches to assess current climate change adaptation trajectories are sorely needed. In this paper, we review the farmer-focused approaches (typical of vulnerability approaches) and agro-ecosystem-focused approaches (typical of resilience approaches). We propose that a combination of the two may be a better way to conceptualize sustainable adaptation to future climate change within an agro-ecological system. To test our hypothesis, we use the case study of Iran, a land that has shown both tremendous resilience and vulnerability in its agro-ecological system. We explore the changes that have occurred in the Iranian farming system and their implications for farmers’ resilience to climate change through an integrated lens combining vulnerability approaches and resilience approaches. During the previous five decades, we describe how Iranian peasants have become small farmers, the land tenure system has changed from a traditional landlord-sharecropping system to family farms, and the quantity and quality of the agro-ecological resources have changed considerably. Our integrative approach provides important insights for both research and policy. We show that combining the two approaches can have far-reaching implications for farmers’ adaptation to future climate change knowledge, policy, and practice since one approach aims to decrease farmers vulnerability and the other approach aims to build resilient agro-ecosystems.     

Improving cross-sectoral climate change adaptation for coastal settlements: insights from South East Queensland,Australia

Climate change impacts affecting coastal areas, such as sea-level rise and storm surge events, are expected to have significant social, economic and environmental consequences worldwide. Ongoing population growth and development in highly urbanised coastal areas will exacerbate the predicted impacts on coastal settlements. Improving the adaptation potential of highly vulnerable coastal communities will require greater levels of planning and policy integration across sectors and scales. However, to date, there is little evidence in the literature which demonstrates how climate policy integration is being achieved. This paper contributes to this gap in knowledge by drawing on the example provided by the process of developing cross-sectoral climate change adaptation policies and programmes generated for three coastal settlement types as part of the South East Queensland Climate Adaptation Research Initiative (SEQCARI), a 3-year multi-sectoral study of climate change adaptation options for human settlements in South East Queensland, Australia. In doing so, we first investigate the benefits and challenges to cross-sectoral adaptation to address climate change broadly and in coastal areas. We then describe how cross-sectoral adaptation policies and programmes were generated and appraised involving the sectors of urban planning and management, coastal management, emergency management, human health and physical infrastructure as part of SEQCARI. The paper concludes by discussing key considerations that can inform the development and assessment of cross-sectoral climate change adaptation policies and programmes in highly urbanised coastal areas.     

Institutional capacity for long-term climate change adaptation: evidence from land use planning in Albay,Philippines

Mainstreaming climate change adaptation (CCA) into plans and programs is still a new approach in adaptation and thus there is limited information on how to operationalize it on-ground. This paper addresses this gap by investigating the challenges in mainstreaming CCA into the local land use plans in the province of Albay, Philippines. Specifically, this paper developed 20 quantitative “mainstreaming indicators” to assess the state-of-play and the challenges for local mainstreaming. These indicators were classified under three groupings, namely, the information, institutional, and resource capacities of systems. Qualitative analysis of the indicator scores suggested that developing the institutional capacities of local governments is crucial in the local mainstreaming process. Likewise, the results highlighted the “institutional issues” indicator as the primary barrier in operationalizing the approach. These institutional issues are: fragmented laws and regulations; overlapping policy requirements; and the lack of guidelines for mainstreaming CCA into the local land use plans. Meanwhile, the “leadership” indicator, as signified by a climate change champion in Albay, was evaluated as an opportunity for local mainstreaming. The champion effectively led the CCA efforts because the existing institutional mechanisms supported the champion’s capacity to influence the behavior of people and produce collective action towards CCA.     

Collaborative governance for climate change adaptation in Canada: experimenting with adaptive co-management

The search for strategies to address ‘super wicked problems’ such as climate change is gaining urgency, and a collaborative governance approach, and adaptive co-management in particular, is increasingly recognized as one such strategy. However, the conditions for adaptive co-management to emerge and the resulting network structures and relational patterns remain unclear in the literature. To address these identified needs, this study examines social relationships from a network perspective while initiating a collaborative multiactor initiative aimed to develop into adaptive co-management for climate change adaptation, an action research project undertaken in the Niagara region of Canada. The project spanned 1 year, and a longitudinal analysis of participants’ networks and level of participation in the process was performed. Evidence of support for climate change adaptation from the process included the development of deliberative and adaptive responses to opportunities presented to the group and the development of a strong subgroup of participants where decision-making was centered. However, the complexity of the challenge of addressing climate change, funding constraints, competing initiatives, and the lack of common views among participants may have contributed to the group, highlighting the finding that beneficial network structural features and relational patterns are necessary but not sufficient condition for the development of an adaptive co-management process. The context of climate change adaptation may require a different social network structure and processes than other contexts for adaptive co-management to occur, and there may be limitations to adaptive co-management for dealing with super wicked problems.     

Climate Adaptation Services for the Netherlands: an operational approach to support spatial adaptation planning

There is a growing availability of climate change information, offered to scientists and policy makers through climate services. However, climate services are not well taken up by the policy-making and planning community. Climate services focus on primary impacts of climate change, e.g., the disclosure of precipitation and temperature data, and this seems insufficient in meeting their needs. In this paper, we argue that, in order to reach the spatial planning community, climate services should take on a wider perspective by translating climate data to policy-relevant indicators and by offering support in the design of adaptation strategies. We argue there should be more focus on translating consequences of climate change to land-use claims and subsequently discuss the validity, consequences and implications of these claims with stakeholders, so they can play a role in spatial planning processes where much of the climate adaptation takes place. The term Climate Adaptation Services is introduced as being a stepwise approach supporting the assessment of vulnerability in a wider perspective and include the design and appraisal of adaptation strategies in a multi-stakeholder setting. We developed the Climate Adaptation Atlas and the Climate Ateliers as tools within the Climate Adaptation Services approach to support decision-making and planning processes. In this paper, we describe the different steps of our approach and report how some of the challenges were addressed.     

Costs and benefits of adapting spatial planning to climate change: lessons learned from a large-scale urban development project in the Netherlands

Climate change increases the vulnerability of low-lying coastal areas. Careful spatial planning can reduce this vulnerability, provided that decision-makers have insight into the costs and benefits of adaptation options. This paper addresses the question which adaptation options are suitable, from an economic perspective, to adapt spatial planning to climate change at a regional scale. We apply social cost–benefit analysis to assess the net benefits of adaptation options that deal with the impacts of climate change-induced extreme events. From the methods applied and results obtained, we also aim at learning lessons for assessing climate adaptation options. The case study area, the Zuidplaspolder, is a large-scale urban development project in the Netherlands. The costs as well as the primary and secondary benefits of adaptation options relating to spatial planning (e.g. flood-proof housing and adjusted infrastructure) are identified and where possible quantified. Our results show that three adaptation options are not efficient investments, as the investment costs exceed the benefits of avoided damages. When we focus on ‘climate proofing’ the total area of the Zuidplaspolder, when the costs and benefits of all the presented adaptation options are considered together, the total package has a positive net present value. The study shows that it is possible to anticipate climate change impacts and assess the costs and benefits of adjusting spatial planning. We have learned that scenario studies provide a useful tool but that decision-making under climate change uncertainty also requires insight into the probabilities of occurrence of weather extremes in the future.     

An integrated decision-support process for adaptation planning: climate change as impetus for scenario planning in an agricultural region of Canada

The amount of information required to adapt to climate change is vast: downscaled climate projections, information on environmental impact, sectoral performance, external drivers, regional strategies, policies and practices. It can be argued that most of this information is accessible at the community/regional level, and thus, the important challenges to adaptation are not information gaps, but constraints created by fragmented planning decisions and a sector-by-sector basis for financial and human resource allocations. To strategically address this through adaptation planning, we developed and tested a place-based decision-making framework that creates an integrated platform for considering regional and global sectoral drivers in Eastern Ontario, Canada. Using available socioeconomic and biophysical information from regional authorities, alternative future scenarios were used to describe the range of socioeconomic futures and their vulnerabilities to climate change. We found that: (1) integration of diverse sets of available data (rather than narrowly focused sectoral assessments) helped identify shared common objectives (maximizing the long-term environmental, economic, social well-being within the region), (2) a high degree of congruence existed as the key drivers of change, irrespective of sector, (3) exploring the future scenarios highlighted shared regional priorities and helped identify adaptation priorities requiring more integrated regional planning.     

Scenario analysis of perspective change to support climate adaptation: lessons from a pilot study on Dutch river management

Climate adaptation is a complex task surrounded by uncertainty. To support climate adaptation policies, a new scenario approach is pursued to explore possible discontinuous future developments of societal perspectives on climate adaptation issues. The scenario approach was tested for a case study on Dutch river management. In a series of scenario development workshops, a select group of stakeholders explored the perspectives on the management of the River Meuse in the past, present, and future. The process was supported by an analytical perspectives mapping tool to illustrate and analyze the development of perspectives over time. The process and analytical tools contributed to insight into the drivers of perspective change for the case study at hand. Moreover, the stakeholders highlighted the potential of the approach for water management policy for creating awareness about the plurality of perspectives and the dynamics of perspective change, monitoring perspectives and perspective change as part of a flexible policy approach, and anticipating on the occurrence of shock events. Further work is required to better represent the social dynamics of perspectives change, to better empirically ground the perspective change model, and to apply integrated water models in the scenario development process to assess water–society interactions.     

Leadership within regional climate change adaptation networks: the case of climate adaptation officers in Northern Hesse,Germany

In the climate adaptation literature, leadership tends to be an understudied factor, although it may be crucial for regional adaptation governance. This article shows how leadership can be usefully conceptualized and operationalized within regional governance networks dealing with climate adaptation. It applies an integrative framework inspired by complexity leadership theory, distinguishing several leadership functions to enhance the adaptive capacity of regional networks. We focus on one specific institutional innovation, appointed climate adaptation officers, who seek to connect science and governance practice, and to mainstream climate adaptation. Our question is twofold: What is the potential of climate adaptation officers to advance the adaptation agenda and to what extent did their establishment and working practice mirror the various leadership functions needed to raise the adaptive capacity of the regional network they operated in? The integrative leadership framework structures the analysis of climate adaptation officers forming part of a government-funded project seeking to enhance adaptation to climate variability in the central German region of Northern Hesse. The data consist of interviews with scientists and regional authority employees and project documentation including an evaluation. We find that climate adaptation officers raised awareness for climate adaptation and helped to shape and implement a number of projects within the overall KLIMZUG programme, highlighting impeding and enabling factors. The process of setting up this institutional innovation involved all forms of leadership functions and is an example of vertical mainstreaming. Its operation involved most clearly enabling and connective leadership functions and is an example of horizontal mainstreaming.     

Towards deliberative coastal governance: insights from South Africa and the Mississippi Delta

Coastal sustainability is elusive in South Africa and the Mississippi delta. These case studies and convergent literatures demonstrate the merits of reconceptualising coastal management as a transformative practice of deliberative governance. A normative framework is presented that focuses attention on underpinning deliberative outcomes to enable governance actors and networks to build cognitive, democratic, sociopolitical and institutional capacity to transform unsustainable and maladaptive coastal practices. But operationalising such intentions is complex and contested and requires a volte-face in thinking and practice. The South African and Mississippi delta experiences provide insights about how to develop a deliberative praxis of coastal governance based on consideration of the choice of process, timeliness, quality of process, equity and representation, connections to the policy cycle, impact, implementation and institutionalisation.     

Mainstreaming climate adaptation into urban planning: overcoming barriers, seizing opportunities and evaluating the results in two Dutch case studies

With cities facing climate change, climate adaptation is necessary to reduce risks such as heat stress and flooding and maintain the goals of sustainable urban development. In climate change literature, the focus has been on developing a new dedicated policy domain for climate adaptation. Yet, empirical evidence shows that in practice actors are searching for solutions that not only serve climate adaptation, but integrate the adaptation objective in existing policy domains (e.g., urban planning, water management, public health). The integration of adaptation in other policy domains, also called “mainstreaming climate adaptation,” can stimulate the effectiveness of policy making through combining objectives, increase efficient use of human and financial resources and ensure long-term sustainable investments. A better understanding of the process of mainstreaming is, however, lacking. The article introduces a conceptual model for mainstreaming climate adaptation to enhance our understanding of the concept as well as the barriers and opportunities that influence these integration processes and to explore strategies for overcoming barriers and creating opportunities. Two Dutch case studies—related to urban planning—are used to illustrate the value of the model. The cases demonstrate the dynamic process of mainstreaming and raise discussion of the appropriate criteria for evaluating mainstreaming in relation to the aims of climate adaptation. The paper concludes with an exploration of specific strategies to facilitate the mainstreaming of adaptation in existing and new policy domains.     

Communicating climate change for adaptation in rural communities: a Pacific study

The academic literature on climate change communications is growing. However, the majority of this literature focuses on the issue of climate change mitigation in a developed country context, and there is little published material regarding communication in a developing country and adaptation context. Similarly, despite community-based approaches to climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction increasing in the Pacific Islands region, there is very limited guidance on how to effectively communicate climate change in a way that enhances people’s resilience. This paper documents the experiences of organisations, including local and international non-government and faith-based organisations, governments, regional technical organisations and donor agencies in communicating climate change for adaptation in the Pacific region. Three key climate change communication challenges are highlighted and suggestions made for overcoming them based on results from interviews, a focus group discussion and an online forum. Finally, recommendations are made for good practice guidance in climate change communication that is empowering and culturally relevant.     

From climate research to climate compatible development: experiences and progress in the Netherlands

Over the past decades, significant experience has been gained in demand-driven research on climate change in many countries. In the Netherlands, a competitive call for proposals for large research programmes at the interface between policy, science and private sector was issued in 2001. Members of the Dutch climate research community proved they were able to develop two large research programme proposals which were funded: ‘Climate changes Spatial Planning’ and its successor ‘Knowledge for Climate’. The programmes ran from 2004 to 2012 and from 2008 to 2014, respectively. Both programmes can be considered as a 10-year research programme experiment to develop knowledge about both the climate system and climate compatible development by crossing disciplines, institutions and national research funding strategies. Within this 10-year period, a trend can be observed in which a ‘top-down’ climate impact assessment approach is increasingly combined with a ‘bottom-up’ approach. Based on the 15 articles presented in this special issue (and others), we argue that this development has enriched both fundamental and applied research on climate adaptation. Despite the predominantly Dutch-oriented scope of the presented research, we believe that such experiences can be of international interest. Climate adaptation research finds itself in between global systems knowledge on the one hand and practical needs and experiences at the local, regional and national level on the other. This demands the utmost from all actors involved to enable an efficient and constructive flow and use of knowledge and expertise.     

Agronomic adaptation strategies under climate change for winter durum wheat and tomato in southern Italy: irrigation and nitrogen fertilization

Agricultural crops are affected by climate change due to the relationship between crop development, growth, yield, CO₂ atmospheric concentration and climate conditions. In particular, the further reduction in existing limited water resources combined with an increase in temperature may result in higher impacts on agricultural crops in the Mediterranean area than in other regions. In this study, the cropping system models CERES-Wheat and CROPGRO-Tomato of the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) were used to analyse the response of winter durum wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum Mill.) crops to climate change, irrigation and nitrogen fertilizer managements in one of most productive areas of Italy (i.e. Capitanata, Puglia). For this analysis, three climatic datasets were used: (1) a single dataset (50?km?×?50?km) provided by the JRC European centre for the period 1975–2005; two datasets from HadCM3 for the IPCC A2 GHG scenario for time slices with +2°C (centred over 2030–2060) and +5°C (centred over 2070–2099), respectively. All three datasets were used to generate synthetic climate series using a weather simulator (model LARS-WG). Adaptation strategies, such as irrigation and N fertilizer managements, have been investigated to either avoid or at least reduce the negative impacts induced by climate change impacts for both crops. Warmer temperatures were primarily shown to accelerate wheat and tomato phenology, thereby resulting in decreased total dry matter accumulation for both tomato and wheat under the +5°C future climate scenario. Under the +2°C scenario, dry matter accumulation and resulting yield were also reduced for tomato, whereas no negative yield effects were observed for winter durum wheat. In general, limiting the global mean temperature change of 2°C, the application of adaptation strategies (irrigation and nitrogen fertilization) showed a positive effect in minimizing the negative impacts of climate change on productivity of tomato cultivated in southern Italy.     

Climate-proof planning for flood-prone areas: assessing the adaptive capacity of planning institutions in the Netherlands

It is generally acknowledged that adapting low-lying, flood-prone deltas to the projected impacts of climate change is of great importance. Deltas are densely populated and often subject to high risk. Climate-proof planning is, however, not only a new but also a highly complex task that poses problems for existing institutional and administrative structures, which are the product of times in which climate issues were of little importance. This paper assesses the capacity of the historically grown Dutch planning institutions to promote climate-proof planning for flood-prone areas. The Adaptive Capacity Wheel provides the methodological framework. The analysis focuses on two planning projects in the west of the Netherlands: the Zuidplas Polder project at the regional level and the Westergouwe project at the local level. It is shown that the planning institutions involved in these projects enable climate-proof planning, but to a limited extent. They face five institutional weaknesses that may cause risks on the long term. To climate-proof urban developments in flood-prone areas, it is necessary to break through the strong path–dependent development of planning institutions and to build in more flexibility in existing rules and procedures.