Most local authorities are not considering the needs of vulnerable people sufficiently when planning for climate change, according to a study led by the University of Twente. The researchers recently published their work in the Nature journal Urban Sustainability.
The 2015 Paris Agreement, an international treaty on climate change, requires regular assessments of climate change adaptation progress, and a global stocktake is currently taking place to measure implementation. “It is important to evaluate the quality of cities’ climate adaption plans since they are particularly threatened by climate change, with many of them being highly vulnerable to heatwaves, flash flooding, coastal erosion and storms”, explains first author Diana Reckien.
General improvement
The researchers found that only 167 out of 327 European cities had full urban adaptation plans by the end of 2020 - with most found in the UK, followed by Poland, France, and Germany. The researchers showed that the general quality of plans, as well as their overall degree of consistency, improved between 2005 and 2020. On average cities improved most in terms of goal setting, suggesting detailed and different measures, and setting out how plans would be implemented. The plans only slightly or barely improved with regard to detailing future monitoring processes.
More recent plans were also more likely to mention the potential impacts of climate change on vulnerable groups. However, plans got worse over time in terms of detailing measures that particularly address vulnerable people, and very few cities involve children, people on low incomes, and the elderly in developing their policies, or monitoring and evaluation processes. In relation to impact/risks and goals, cities listed substantially more impacts/risks than they did goals, suggesting little alignment between the two.
The researchers also measured consistency, namely that impacts/risks, goals, measures, monitoring, and participation are aligned. For example, heat waves put older people at particular risk. If a city identifies that it is vulnerable to an increase in heatwaves, a good plan also designs and implements specific heat-related measures, focusing on the elderly. It also puts mechanisms in place to assess whether the heat risk for the elderly has reduced after implementation.
Online scoring tool
To help city practitioners assess the quality of their plans, the researchers developed a free, online Climate Change Adaptation Scoring tool that calculates ‘ADAptation plan Quality Assessment’ (ADAQA) indices for individual cities. With the tool, local climate practitioners can check whether their plans are covering the right topics and benchmark against others.
In addition, the components of the indices can be used to benchmark and fast-track improvements in the next generation of plans. The authors recommend that governments and agencies provide more resources, such as the ADAQA indices, to support cities in tracking and assessing their progress.
More information
Corresponding author Dr. Diana Reckien is Associate Professor Climate Change and Urban inequalities at the Faculty of ITC. She is also one of the Featured Scientists of the University of Twente. This research has been carried out together with universities from Hungary, Spain, Greece, Germany, Portugal, Italy, Cyprus, France, the UK, Sweden, Croatia, Estonia, Bulgaria, the Netherlands and Denmark.
The full paper, Assessing the quality of urban climate adaptation plans over time, has been published open-access in the Nature journal Urban Sustainability.
