Eric Chu

Inclusive approaches to urban climate adaptation planning and implementation in the Global South

As cities increasingly engage in climate adaptation planning, many are seeking to promote public participation and facilitate the engagement of different civil society actors. Still, the variations that exist among participatory approaches and the merits and tradeoffs associated with each are not well understood. This article examines the experiences of Quito (Ecuador) and Surat (India) to assess how civil society actors contribute to adaptation planning and implementation. The results showcase two distinct approaches to public engagement. The first emphasizes participation of experts, affected communities, and a wide array of citizens to sustain broadly inclusive programmes that incorporate local needs and concerns into adaptation processes and outcomes. The second approach focuses on building targeted partnerships between key government, private, and civil society actors to institutionalize robust decision-making structures, enhance abilities to raise funds, and increase means to directly engage with local community and international actors. A critical analysis of these approaches suggests more inclusive planning processes correspond to higher climate equity and justice outcomes in the short term, but the results also indicate that an emphasis on building dedicated multi-sector governance institutions may enhance long-term programme stability, while ensuring that diverse civil society actors have an ongoing voice in climate adaptation planning and implementation. Policy relevance Many local governments in the Global South experience severe capacity and resource constraints. Cities are often required to devolve large-scale planning and decision-making responsibilities, such as those critical to climate adaptation, to different civil society actors. As a result, there needs to be more rigorous assessments of how civil society participation contributes to the adaptation policy and planning process and what local social, political, and economic factors dictate the way cities select different approaches to public engagement. Also, since social equity and justice are key indicators for determining the effectiveness and sustainability of adaptation interventions, urban adaptation plans and policies must also be designed according to local institutional strengths and civic capacities in order to account for the needs of the poor and most vulnerable. Inclusivity, therefore, is critical for ensuring equitable planning processes and just adaptation outcomes.

Equity Impacts of Urban Land Use Planning for Climate Adaptation Critical Perspectives from the Global North and South

A growing number of cities are preparing for climate change impacts by developing adaptation plans. However, little is known about how these plans and their implementation affect the vulnerability of the urban poor. We critically assess initiatives in eight cities worldwide and find that land use planning for climate adaptation can exacerbate socio-spatial inequalities across diverse developmental and environmental conditions. We argue that urban adaptation injustices fall into two categories: acts of commission, when interventions negatively affect or displace poor communities, and acts of omission, when they protect and prioritize elite groups at the expense of the urban poor.

Inserting rights and justice into urban resilience: a focus on everyday risk

Resilience building has become a growing policy agenda, particularly for urban risk management. While much of the resilience agenda has been shaped by policies and discourses from the global North, its applicability for cities of the global South, particularly African cities, has not been sufficiently assessed. Focusing on rights of urban citizens as the object to be made resilient, rather than physical and ecological infrastructures, may help to address many of the root causes that characterize the unacceptable risks that urban residents face on a daily basis. Linked to this idea, we discuss four entry points for grounding a rights and justice orientation for urban resilience. First, notions of resilience must move away from narrow, financially oriented risk analyses. Second, opportunities must be created for “negotiated resilience”, to allow for attention to processes that support these goals, as well as for the integration of diverse interests. Third, achieving resilience in ways that do justice to the local realities of diverse urban contexts necessitates taking into account endogenous, locally situated processes, knowledges and norms. And finally, urban resilience needs to be placed within the context of global systems, providing an opportunity for African contributions to help reimagine the role that cities might play in these global financial, political and science processes.

Explaining Progress in Climate Adaptation Planning Across 156 U.S. Municipalities

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Cities are increasingly experiencing the effects of climate change and taking steps to adapt to current and future natural hazard risks. Research on these efforts has identified numerous barriers to climate adaptation planning, but has not yet systematically evaluated the relative importance of different constraints for a large number of diverse cities. We draw on responses from 156 U.S. cities that participated in a 2011 global survey on local adaptation planning, 60% of which are planning for climate change. We use logistic regression analysis to assess the significance of 13 indicators measuring political leadership, fiscal and administrative resources, ability to obtain and communicate climate information, and state policies in predicting the status of adaptation planning. In keeping with the literature, we find that greater local elected officials’ commitment, higher municipal expenditures per capita, and an awareness that the climate is already changing are associated with cities engaging in adaptation planning. The presence of state policies on climate adaptation is surprisingly not a statistically significant predictor, suggesting that current policies are not yet strong enough to increase local adaptation planning. However, the models sampling bias toward larger and more environmentally progressive cities may mask the predictive power of state policies and other indicators. Takeaway for practice: State governments have an opportunity to increase local political commitment by integrating requirements for climate-risk evaluations into existing funding streams and investment plans. Regional planning entities also can help overcome the lack of local fiscal capacity and political support by facilitating the exchange of information, pooling and channeling resources, and providing technical assistance to local planners.

A review of decision-support models for adaptation to climate change in the context of development

In order to increase adaptive capacity and empower people to cope with their changing environment, it is imperative to develop decision-support tools that help people understand and respond to challenges and opportunities. Some such tools have emerged in response to social and economic shifts in light of anticipated climatic change. Climate change will play out at the local level, and adaptive behaviours will be influenced by local resources and knowledge. Community-based insights are essential building blocks for effective planning. However, in order to mainstream and scale up adaptation, it is useful to have mechanisms for evaluating the benefits and costs of candidate adaptation strategies. This article reviews relevant literature and presents an argument in favour of using various modelling tools directed at these considerations. The authors also provide evidence for the balancing of qualitative and quantitative elements in assessments of programme proposals considered for financing through mechanisms that have the potential to scale up effective adaptation, such as the Adaptation Fund under the Kyoto Protocol. The article concludes that it is important that researchers and practitioners maintain flexibility in their analyses, so that they are themselves adaptable, to allow communities to best manage the emerging challenges of climate change and the long-standing challenges of development.

The political economy of urban climate adaptation and development planning in Surat, India

This paper argues for a political economic approach to understanding climate change adaptation and development planning in an urban context. Based on field research conducted in Surat, India, across a period of two years, I illustrate how climate adaptation is rooted in preexisting and contextually specific urban political relationships that can be traced through the citys developmental history. Through assessing Surats experience with recent industrialization, episodes of natural disasters, to more recent engagement with the Asian Cities Climate Change Resilience Network, I highlight how adaptation planning, as well as how adaptation is integrated into urban development planning, occurs through processes of prioritizing adaptation against development needs and implementing options that are cocreated among public and civic actors. This case empirically shows how adaptation is mainstreamed into urban development planning, illustrates the trade-offs associated with how different urban actors plan and implement adaptation in the context of rapid industrialization, and assesses how internationally funded adaptation programs are operationalized in the context of local social and political realities.

Human Atlas: A Tool for Mapping Social Networks

Most social network analyses focus on online social networks. While these networks encode important aspects of our lives they fail to capture many real-world social connections. Most of these connections are, in fact, public and known to the members of the community. Mapping them is a task very suitable for crowdsourcing: it is easily broken down in many simple and independent subtasks. Due to the nature of social networks-presence of highly connected nodes and tightly knit groups-if we allow users to map their immediate connections and the connections between them, we will need few participants to map most connections within a community. To this end, we built the Human Atlas, a web-based tool for mapping social networks. To test it, we partially mapped the social network of the MIT Media Lab. We ran a user study and invited members of the community to use the tool. In 4.6 man-hours, 22 participants mapped 984 connections within the lab, demonstrating the potential of the tool.

Inclusive Development and Climate Change: The Geopolitics of Fossil Fuel Risks in Developing Countries

This conceptual paper brings together two previously disparate strands of scholarship on climate change and development together with emerging studies of stranded assets. It addresses the question: What are the lessons learnt from this literature for the way developing countries should ‘develop’ in a post-Paris Agreement world? The paper argues that instead of a blind neo-colonial process of rapidly replicating the development paths of already industrialized countries – especially in the context of the fossil fuel sector – developing countries must adopt their own unique development strategies that are more inclusive and transformative. The foregone economic gains from not investing in fossil fuels maybe compensated by the reduced risks of stranded assets and climate change impacts in the future – as well as the reduced risks of climate change impacts on, for example, the agricultural sector – which may facilitate their own unique paths toward inclusive development.

The Geo-Ecological Risks of Oil Investments by China and the Global South: The Right to Development Revisited

Citation for published version (APA): Gupta, J., Chu, E., Bos, K., & Kuijten, T. (2017). The Geo-Ecological Risks of Oil Investments by China and the Global South: The Right to Development Revisited. In M. P. Amineh, & Y. Guang (Eds.), Geopolitical Economy of Energy and Environment: China and the European Union (pp. 273-304). (International Comparative Social Studies; Vol. 36). Leiden: Brill. https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004273115_011