City climate plans are improving but still neglect vulnerable people
Most local authorities are not considering the needs of vulnerable people sufficiently when planning for climate change, according to a study of more than 300 European cities.
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.
However, a recent study involving Nottingham Business School (NBS), part of Nottingham Trent University, has 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 research, led by University of Twente in the Netherlands, created indices to evaluate the quality of urban adaptation plans in relation to six well-established principles 1.) fact base of potential impacts and risks in the local area; 2.) adaptation goals; 3.) adaptation measures; 4.) details on the implementation of adaptation measures; 5.) monitoring & evaluation of adaptation measures; and 6.) societal participation in plan creation.
It also measured consistency, namely that impacts/risks, goals, measures, monitoring, and participation are aligned with each other. For example, if a city identifies that it is vulnerable to an increase in heatwaves, which put older people at particular risk, a good plan also designs and implements specific heat-related measures, focussing on elderly people, and puts mechanisms in place to assess whether the heat risk for elderly people has reduced after implementation.
Dr Peter Eckersley, Nottingham Business School
Findings showed that the general quality of plans, as well as their overall degree of consistency, improved between 2005 and 2020 – and recent plans were 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 elderly people in developing their policies, or propose monitoring and evaluating whether council initiatives reduce their exposure to climate threats.
In relation to impact/risks and goals, cities listed substantially more impacts/risks than they did goals, suggesting little alignment between the two.
On average cities most improved in terms of goal setting, suggesting detailed and different measures, and detailing out the implementation. The plans only slightly or barely improved with regard to detailing future monitoring processes.
Dr Peter Eckersley, Senior Research Fellow in Public Policy and Management at NBS, said: “We saw that between 2005 and 2020, adaptation plans got better in aligning goals with impacts and risks, but this is still not done comprehensively. In addition, plans focus more on vulnerable sectors and industries than on the needs of vulnerable groups of citizens.
“Vulnerable groups are rarely involved in participation processes and the vast majority of plans make no mention of monitoring and evaluation to address their specific needs. Cities have to start taking the specific needs of these people into account.”
The study has led to the creation of a free, online Climate Change Adaptation Scoring tool which calculates ‘ADAptation plan Quality Assessment’ (ADAQA) indices for individual cities, thereby allowing local climate practitioners to check whether their plans are covering the right topics and to 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.
The full paper, Quality of urban climate adaptation plans over time, has been published in the Nature journal Urban Sustainability.