Local governance and collaborative tools in climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction strategies

Key words: governance, collaborative tools, environmental design, resilience, Climate change adaptation, Disaster risk reduction

In the last decades, two specific themes are at the centre of contemporary debate on climate change or disaster risk issues in urban areas: the “sustainable city”, that integrates a balanced economic, social, and environmental development, and the “resilient city”, that includes the capacity of urban systems to anticipate and face extreme events. Those principles are emerging as innovation and experimentation hubs in which challenges related to climate change and natural hazards are tackled as opportunities for the social, economic, and environmental transition, in line with imperatives of global agendas as the Paris Agreement, the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015-2030, and the New Urban Agenda, but also European agendas as European GreenDeal, European Adaptation Strategy, and NextGenerationEU. Therefore, urban planners and decision-makers need to integrate efforts to mitigate the causes of climate change (mitigation) and adapt to changing climatic conditions (adaptation).

 

To support this transition, the central challenge is to bring evidence-based concepts in action and consider the complexity of dynamic interdependencies in terms of climate benefits and co-benefits for the community and at the same time provide consistent decision-making support for stakeholders. To implement integrated climate mitigation and adaptation strategies in cities, a transdisciplinary, trans-sectoral and transnational process is needed, to bring science into practice and to identify and implement transformations at local scale. Community and institutional coordination have a central place in this domain. In order to keep an interdisciplinarity and connections between policy experts, technical services, and urban designers, resilient cities need a strong an effective risk governance framework, based on the promotion of knowledge-based decision-making processes. Such processes are aimed at evolving traditional approaches to environmental and spatial planning in orded to develop effective responses at local scale, raising questions over both technical solutions and appropriate governance structures in place. The development of a collaborative, socio-technical process appears vital to meet contemporary city challenges. This multi-dimensionality requires tools and methods of analysis to streamline links between research advancements and practice. Soft tools enabling stakeholder and community engagement, co-production of knowledge, collaborative mapping of priorities and co-design of solutions are crucial to support the needed radical shift in governance, planning and design practice.

 

The contribution will present methods and tools developed withing ongoing EU collaborative research projects: Erasmus+ KA220 “UCCRN_edu - Urban Climate Change Research Network for Higher Education: Climate-Resilient Design, Planning and Governance of Cities” (www.uccrn.education) and Horizon Europe “KNOWING - Framework for defining climate mitigation pathways based on understanding and integrated assessment of climate impacts, adaptation strategies and societal transformation”. In these experiences local authorities, stakeholders, and community are engaged to collaboratively envision city transformation pathways, to identify common goals and divergence elements, to evaluate climate benefits and social, economic and environmental co-benefits of possible technical solutions.