Laura Bonzanigo

Sustainable tourism planning and climate change adaptation in the Alps: a case study of winter tourism in mountain communities in the Dolomites

ABSTRACT A vast body of literature suggests that the European Alpine Region is extremely sensitive to climate change. Winter tourism is closely related to climate variations, especially in mountain regions where resorts are heavily dependent on snow. This paper explores how to effectively integrate a climate change adaptation perspective with local discourses about sustainability and tourism, an increasing priority for policy-makers in the region and elsewhere. It reports on the development and application of a participatory decision support process for the analysis of adaptation strategies for local development of an Alpine tourism destination, Auronzo di Cadore (Dolomites, Italy). This experience significantly contributed to the idea that an efficient combination of modelling capabilities, decision support tools, and participatory processes can substantially improve decision-making for sustainability. The authors show that, in this case study, such a combination of methods and tools allowed for managing the involvement of local actors, stimulating local debates on climate change adaptation and possible consequences on winter tourism, encouraging creativity and smoothing potential conflicts, and easing the integration of the qualitative knowledge and the preferences of the involved actors with quantitative information. This contributed to an integrated sustainability assessment of alternative strategies for sustainable tourism planning.

Climate Change and Poverty -- an Analytical Framework

Climate change and climate policies will affect poverty reduction efforts through direct and immediate impacts on the poor and by affecting factors that condition poverty reduction, such as economic growth. This paper explores this relation between climate change and policies and poverty outcomes by examining three questions: the (static) impact on poor peoples livelihood and well-being; the impact on the risk for non-poor individuals to fall into poverty; and the impact on the ability of poor people to escape poverty. The paper proposes four channels that determine household consumption and through which households may escape or fall into poverty (prices, assets, productivity, and opportunities). It then discusses whether and how these channels are affected by climate change and climate policies, focusing on the exposure, vulnerability, and ability to adapt of the poor (and those vulnerable to poverty). It reviews the existing literature and offers three major conclusions. First, climate change is likely to represent a major obstacle to a sustained eradication of poverty. Second, climate policies are compatible with poverty reduction provided that (i) poverty concerns are carefully taken into account in their design and (ii) they are accompanied by the appropriate set of social policies. Third, climate change does not modify how poverty policies should be designed, but it creates greater needs and more urgency. The scale issue is explained by the fact that climate will cause more frequent and more severe shocks; the urgency, by the need to exploit the window of opportunity given to us before climate impacts are likely to substantially increase.

Agricultural policy informed by farmers’ adaptation experience to climate change in Veneto, Italy

Abstract There is an increasing call for agricultural water management to adapt to climate change, yet efforts in this direction often consider only the policy dimension, or planned adaptation perspective. However, it is crucial to include an assessment of farmers’ autonomous adaptation into the design and evaluation of rural policy measures. Amongst others, this helps avoid doubling efforts and ensure the effectiveness of the policies proposed. Moreover, farmers are the primary receivers of climate-proofing agricultural policies. Hence, to maximise a policy’s success, it is fundamental to include farmers in its design phases. Farmers autonomously react to changes and policies should build on ongoing efforts. This work, carried out in the Veneto Region of Italy, proved the advantages of approaching adaptation as a continuum between autonomous and planned, rather than addressing the two separately. We first collected farmers’ perceptions of and adaptations to change through an online questionnaire. We then identified the major determinants of their choice to adapt through a multinomial probit model. We analysed farmers’ expectations of effectiveness of five different adaptation options for water conservation, via an ad-hoc online decision support system tool, mDSSweb. Our work provided policy makers with information on how different typologies of farmers are (not) adapting their practices to climate change. We clearly identified which groups of farmers the policies should target first and with what type of support. Both policy makers and farmers reacted positively to our approach and expressed interest in up-scaling it to become more inclusive.

Robust Decision-Making in the Water Sector: A Strategy for Implementing Lima?S Long-Term Water Resources Master Plan

How can water resource agencies make smart investments to ensure long-term water reliability when the future is fraught with deep climate and economic uncertainty? This study helped SEDAPAL, the water utility serving Lima, Peru, answer this question by drawing on state of the art methods for decision making under deep uncertainty. These methods provide techniques for evaluating the performance of a water system over a wide range of plausible futures and then developing strategies that are robust across these futures. Rather than weighting futures probabilistically to define an optimal strategy, these methodologies identify the vulnerabilities of a system and then evaluate the key trade-offs among different adaptive strategies. Through extensive iteration and collaboration with SEDAPAL, the study used these methods to define an investment strategy that is robust, ensuring water reliability across as wide a range of future conditions as possible while also being economically efficient. First,on completion, the study helped SEDAPAL realize that not all projects included in the Master Plan were necessary to achieve water reliability, and the utility could save 25 percent (more than

Climate Change and Its Impacts on Tourism in the Alps - The Pilot Area of Auronzo Di Cadore (Belluno)

600 million) in investment costs. Second, the study helped focus future efforts on demand-side management, pricing, and soft infrastructure, a refocusing that is difficult to achieve in traditional utility companies. Third, the study helped SEDAPAL gain the support of regulatory and budget agencies through the careful analysis of alternatives. Fourth, the study allowed the utility to postpone lower priority investments, and to analyze future options based on climate and demand information that simply is not available now.

Improving the resilience of Peru's road network to climate events

The mountain area of the Veneto Region covers a third of its entire surface. Here the importance of tourism, and especially winter tourism, has grown constantly in time, making it a primary source of alpine wealth and a driver for the regional economy. However, in the last decade, different studies have highlighted a phase of stagnation for what concerns tourist fluxes, partly due to a lower attractiveness of the mountain tourism offer. This might depend on different social and economic factors, but also on the impacts of climate change, whose occurrence makes it difficult to secure a sufficient snow cover throughout the entire winter season, particularly at lower elevations. In this context, the project ClimAlpTour (Climate change and its impacts on tourism in the Alps), funded by the European Union as part of the Alpine Space Programme 2007–2013 and led by the Veneto Region, analysed one of today’s most burning issues: the impacts of climate change on tourism in the Alpine arc with particular focus on the economic, social and environmental factors related to both summer and winter activities. The Alpine arc is characterised by both a highly heterogeneous landscape and very dissimilar climatic conditions, which shape the region’s overall richness in terms of ecosystems and habitats. Thus, climate change does not affect this territory homogeneously. The partnership of the ClimAlpTour project, in its attempt to cover this diversity, lists representatives of the entire Alpine region including institutions from Italy (Veneto, Piedmont, Aosta Valley, Lombardy, Autonomous Province of Bolzano), Austria (Vienna and Tirol), France (Rhone Alpes), Germany (Bavaria), Slovenia, and Switzerland. Such comprehensiveness and the involvement of several local institutions through whose collaboration partners were able to analyse issues and peculiarities of tourism in these areas. The project revolved around the analysis of several pilot sites, which alpine were considered by experts to possess particularly significant and representative tourist and environmental conditions. The initial surveyed data included climatic data, market data, and other economic and social parameters. One of the main objectives of ClimAlpTour was to establish and offer to the local administrations a decision support system for differentiating tourism supply while adapting to possible future changes in alpine weather conditions due to climate change. The Veneto Region selected the pilot area of Auronzo di Cadore and Misurina because it presented great opportunities – in many instances still not fully exploited – for further developments of tourist seasons. This destination, which traditionally has been alpine well positioned in terms of summer tourism, is now attempting to improve the winter season supply, taking into consideration strong neighbouring competitors and environmental sustainability. The study reported herein describes the project’s experience within the Municipality of Auronzo di Cadore. Two participatory workshops alpine were conduced with the inclusion of a representative set of local stakeholders, which led to the identification and evaluation of alternative strategies for winter tourism development within a framework of adaptation measures to climate change.

Shock Waves: Managing the Impacts of Climate Change on Poverty

This paper proposes a methodology to prioritize interventions in Perus road network. A network model is built, linking the countrys economic and population centers through indicative corridors, which are defined as the least-cost routes to connect origins to destinations. The networks critical links are identified by systematically simulating disruptions and calculating the costs associated with them. The network is then overlaid with natural hazard layers. The average annual losses associated with the hazard disruptions of the critical links are calculated in many scenarios, including climate change uncertainty and different impacts and reconstruction times. A robust decision-making approach is then used to select interventions that decrease hazard disruption costs.