Marta Olazabal

Resilience trade-offs: addressing multiple scales and temporal aspects of urban resilience

The concept of urban resilience has so far been related mainly to climate change adaptation and disaster management perspectives. Here we aim to broaden the discussion by showing how the framework of urban resilience should be related to wider sustainability challenges, including i) climate change and natural hazard threats, ii) unsustainable urban metabolism patterns and iii) increasing social inequalities in cities. Using three case studies (flood risk management in the Dutch polders, urban–rural teleconnections driving the Bolivian quinoa market, and spatial diversity in the adaptive capacity of Kampala slums),(1) we draw out significant insights related to scales and sustainability, which will push urban resilience research forward. The key “move” is to consider both spatial and temporal interactions, in order to shift from the mainstreaming of the resilience-building paradigm toward a critical understanding and management of resilience trade-offs. While urban resilience emerges not necessarily as a normatively positive concept anymore, we argue that addressing multi-scale and temporal aspects of urban resilience will allow greater understanding of global sustainability challenges.

National climate policies across Europe and their impacts on cities strategies.

Globally, efforts are underway to reduce anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and to adapt to climate change impacts at the local level. However, there is a poor understanding of the relationship between city strategies on climate change mitigation and adaptation and the relevant policies at national and European level. This paper describes a comparative study and evaluation of cross-national policy. It reports the findings of studying the climate change strategies or plans from 200 European cities from Austria, Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and the United Kingdom. The study highlights the shared responsibility of global, European, national, regional and city policies. An interpretation and illustration of the influences from international and national networks and policy makers in stimulating the development of local strategies and actions is proposed. It was found that there is no archetypical way of planning for climate change, and multiple interests and motivations are inevitable. Our research warrants the need for a multi-scale approach to climate policy in the future, mainly ensuring sufficient capacity and resource to enable local authorities to plan and respond to their specific climate change agenda for maximising the management potentials for translating environmental challenges into opportunities.

Local Strategies for Climate Change Adaptation: Urban Planning Criteria for Municipalities of the Basque Country, Spain

Major efforts in the struggle against climate change have been made in the Basque Country. These include instruments such as the Basque Climate Change Office, the Basque Plan to Combat Climate Change, and the many initiatives carried out under the framework of Udalsarea 21 – Basque Network of Municipalities for Sustainability (made up of 199 municipalities and representing 98.8% of the population of the Basque Country). Moreover, specific legislation on climate change is expected to come into force in 2011. In particular, the Basque Government is developing the Climate Change Law and the Sustainable Mobility Law. Additionally, in response to the annual call for eco-innovation projects, the Basque Government is engaged in two climate change adaptation initiatives within the framework of the Udalsarea 21. Both initiatives aim at generating and piloting methodological resources to help municipal authorities establish adaptation policies. The main elements are: (1) methodological directives to draw up local adaptation strategies, and (2) preparation of specific criteria of urban adaptation to climate change to be incorporated into urban planning.

Upscaling the Impacts of Climate Change in Different Sectors and Adaptation Strategies

Abstract This chapter aims to provide up-to-date quantitative estimates of the costs and benefits related to adaptation strategies for different sectors in Europe. This is done by critically evaluating modeling frameworks and contexts applied to adaptation and by describing new developments achieved in sectoral assessment models (water, agriculture, ecosystems, and health). Robust methodologies have been applied to deal with uncertainty and an advanced discussion is included on the challenges learnt to better address the upscaling issue from bottom-up adaptation processes. Costs and benefits are explored with respect to present and future climate scenarios, different socioeconomic development pathways and different adaptation strategies. In all models, the Shared Socioeconomic Pathways 2 (“middle of the road”), 3 (“fragmented world”), and 5 (“market-driven development”) are considered for comparative assessment as well as the climate scenarios according to remote concentration pathway 4.5 (average climate change) and 8.5 (high climate change) at 2050 (also see Chapter 2: Storylines and Pathways for Adaptation in Europe).

Is Connectivity a Desirable Property in Urban Resilience Assessments

The need to look at environmental-related problems from a systemic perspective has been increasingly highlighted in current scientific literature. Especially in a context of climate change uncertainty, it is helpful to identify interdependencies and cascading impacts that might happen under certain management or policy scenarios. In the context of resilience management and given the inherent complexity of cities, this becomes especially relevant if one considers potential trade-offs or perverse transformability interventions that may have negative impacts on environmental quality, social equity or well-being. The network perspective in resilience theory has been argued to be useful to assess system’s robustness, connectivity and dependency. Connectivity as a characteristic of the system, has been particularly presented as a determinant of urban resilience in the literature, but, so far and to our knowledge, no study has presented empirical evidence on this regard. To contribute to this debate, this chapter uses a case study on urban energy resilience in the city of Bilbao (Spain) to illustrate the role of connectivity in an urban system and its positive and negative effects on resilience and transformability. Main findings point out the context-specific nature of this property of the system and the difficulty of establishing a normative desirable trend.

The Diversity of Adaptation in a Multilevel Governance Setting

Abstract This chapter provides an overview of climate change adaptation across Europe, from an interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspective, drawing on key findings from case study-based research on local climate change impacts and adaptation solutions, including an analysis of participatory, economic, and sociopolitical approaches, methodologies, and tools. Structured in six sections, the chapter builds upon a set of analytical discussions regarding: the diversity of climate change impacts and adaptation solutions at the local level; the role of participatory methods and approaches; the results of economic evaluation methods and models applied to local case studies; a framework for identifying best practices and characterizing the key barriers and opportunities for implementing local strategies and plans; and a set of robust guidelines and evaluation criteria for climate change adaptation measures. Key findings highlight the intricacies of local-level adaptation utilizing robust examples from case studies across European regions, and provide a comprehensive analysis of local strategies and plans, from a multilevel, multiactor, and multiscale perspective. The chapter also discusses and presents a set of methodological approaches that can be applied to facilitate local-level adaptation while also providing an analytical framework for comparing and evaluating local climate change adaptation.