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Tackling Uncertainty in US Local Climate Adaptation Planning
Abstract
Climate adaptation presents some new forms of planning uncertainty. We identified thirteen types of climate change uncertainty and grouped these into four categories. Next, we summarized eleven planning techniques, noting that only six of these techniques reflect an adapt and monitor approach that actively engages uncertainty. We then evaluated the types of uncertainty and planning techniques identified in forty-four US local climate adaptation plans. We found no communities used scenario planning or robust strategies despite the emphasis placed on these techniques in the literature.
... Such revision, or novelty, can enhance system resilience and build adaptive capacity [35,36]. A key attribute of this approach is the use of conceptual models and gathering information and insights periodically through iterative evaluation and monitoring and the ability to change course based on changing or unforeseen conditions [37]. This foundational principle of BRACE underscores the need to regularly assess the factors contributing to, as well as undermining, outcomes in terms of implementing strategies that are building resilience to climate change. ...
... The barriers identified in these case studies have confirmed findings from previous studies, such as those stemming from competing demands or staff and resource limitations [17][18][19][20][21][22]. Uncertainty in climate impacts was also identified in a majority of the projects, confirming challenges found by Stults et al. [37]. Each of these barriers impacted effectiveness or timeliness of the products and outcomes of each project. ...
... Some efforts to understand how adaptive management works in the field have uncovered notable challenges [38][39][40][41]. Stults et al. [37] have identified 13 distinct types of climate change uncertainty that affect planning. They also reviewed prominent planning techniques and noted that not all attempt to actively engage uncertainty. ...
State and local public health agencies are at the forefront of planning and responding to the health challenges of climate hazards but face substantial barriers to effective climate and health adaptation amidst concurrent environmental and public health crises. To ensure successful adaptation, it is necessary to understand and overcome these barriers. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Climate-Ready States and Cities Initiative (CRSCI) provides funding to state and local health departments to anticipate and respond to health impacts from climate change using the Building Resilience Against Climate Effects (BRACE) framework. This paper explores the barriers to and enablers of successful adaptation projects among BRACE West CRSCI grantees, including Arizona, California, Oregon, and the city and county of San Francisco. The barriers included competing demands such as the COVID-19 pandemic, dependence on partners with similar challenges, staff and leadership turnover, uncertain and complex impacts on at-risk populations, and inadequate resources. The enablers included effective partnerships, leadership support, dedicated and skilled internal staff, and policy windows enabling institutional change and reprioritization. These findings highlight effective strategies in the field that state and local health departments may use to anticipate potential barriers and establish their work in an environment conducive to successful adaptation.
... New forms of uncertainties around local capacities to respond to climate change and the effectiveness of responses, including changes in human behaviors, also pose a challenge to urban planning. Stults and Larsen (2018) recently reviewed climate adaptation planning literature and identified thirteen types of climate-related uncertainties that local city planners are facing. These uncertainties were grouped into four categories, including: (1) uncertainty in future climate conditions; (2) uncertainty in climate-related behaviors and political decisions external to the municipality; (3) uncertainty in climate-related local coping capacity; and (4) uncertainty in effective local responses. ...
... On the other hand, although coping capacities and effectiveness of responses (Categories 3 and 4 above) fall under the direct influence of local planners, there are also large knowledge gaps that further complicate these types of uncertainties (Stults and Larsen 2018). With respect to, for instance, our urban infrastructure-roads, buildings, water, power, etc.-there is unpredictability in the extent to which it can adapt to accelerated climate change. ...
... This is because of the decades and centuries that our infrastructure has had to withstand the building of interconnecting infrastructure, embedding of new hardware, and most recently, implementation of new technologies (e.g., sensors and computing, automation) . Similarly, knowing the conditions that enable communities to effectively cope with changing climate conditions is difficult to ascertain (Stults and Larsen 2018), especially when many of the analytical approaches used to evaluate community vulnerability and adaptive capacities are limited to static, place-based attributes and miss other important, dynamic dimensions of coping capacities . ...
This open access book addresses the way in which urban and urbanizing regions profoundly impact and are impacted by climate change. The editors and authors show why cities must wage simultaneous battles to curb global climate change trends while adapting and transforming to address local climate impacts. This book addresses how cities develop anticipatory and long-range planning capacities for more resilient futures, earnest collaboration across disciplines, and radical reconfigurations of the power regimes that have institutionalized the disenfranchisement of minority groups.
Although planning processes consider visions for the future, the editors highlight a more ambitious long-term positive visioning approach that accounts for unpredictability, system dynamics and equity in decision-making.
This volume brings the science of urban transformation together with practices of professionals who govern and manage our social, ecological and technological systems to design processes by which cities may achieve resilient urban futures in the face of climate change.
... New forms of uncertainties around local capacities to respond to climate change and the effectiveness of responses, including changes in human behaviors, also pose a challenge to urban planning. Stults and Larsen (2018) recently reviewed climate adaptation planning literature and identified thirteen types of climate-related uncertainties that local city planners are facing. These uncertainties were grouped into four categories, including: (1) uncertainty in future climate conditions; (2) uncertainty in climate-related behaviors and political decisions external to the municipality; (3) uncertainty in climate-related local coping capacity; and (4) uncertainty in effective local responses. ...
... On the other hand, although coping capacities and effectiveness of responses (Categories 3 and 4 above) fall under the direct influence of local planners, there are also large knowledge gaps that further complicate these types of uncertainties (Stults and Larsen 2018). With respect to, for instance, our urban infrastructure-roads, buildings, water, power, etc.-there is unpredictability in the extent to which it can adapt to accelerated climate change. ...
... This is because of the decades and centuries that our infrastructure has had to withstand the building of interconnecting infrastructure, embedding of new hardware, and most recently, implementation of new technologies (e.g., sensors and computing, automation) Chester and Allenby 2018). Similarly, knowing the conditions that enable communities to effectively cope with changing climate conditions is difficult to ascertain (Stults and Larsen 2018), especially when many of the analytical approaches used to evaluate community vulnerability and adaptive capacities are limited to static, place-based attributes and miss other important, dynamic dimensions of coping capacities . ...
Anticipatory thinking is a critical component in urban planning practices and knowledge systems in an era of unpredictability and conflicting expectations of the future. This chapter introduces “anticipatory resilience” as a futures-oriented knowledge system that intentionally addresses uncertain climate conditions and explores alternative, desirable future states. It suggests a portfolio of tools suitable for building long-term foresight capacity in urban planning. Examples of knowledge systems interventions are presented to explore the trade-offs, constraints, possibilities, and desires of diverse future scenarios co-generated in settings with people that hold different perspectives, knowledge, and expectations.
... Thereafter, the plan is iteratively monitored and adapted over time, as knowledge about climate uncertainties evolve . Significant amount of work explores formulation of the scenarios and types of policies such a plan would contain (Hallegatte, 2009) (Stults & Larsen, 2018) (Haasnoot, Kwakkel, Walker, & ter Matt, 2013). However, relatively few studies focus on the monitoring methodology for spatial policies (Bloemen, Reeder, Zevenbergen, Rijke, & Kingsborough, 2017). ...
... Hence, a secondary measure for assessing effectiveness is low-regret. Based on Stults and Larson's definition, low-regret strategies provide multiple vulnerability reducing benefits in current flood scenario and may be modified or enhanced in future flood scenarios (Stults & Larsen, 2018). Low-regret is often perceived to be the first step for communities that lack resources or willingness to take climate action. ...
In face of climate impact uncertainties, literature calls for plans that can adapt over time. However, to anticipate the need for adaptation, a community needs to monitor the effectiveness of policies in plans over time. This report adapts the Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard to evaluate policies that affect current and future flood vulnerability in Dordrecht. Preliminary results show that while Dordrecht is robust in the 2010 scenario, few districts show adaptation gaps in future scenarios.
... Adaptive management is well acknowledged and included in environmental water management (Tonkin et al., 2020;Watts et al., 2020;Horne et al., 2022), but there can be lagged ecological feedbacks, and thresholds or tipping points may pass before managers are even aware. Other reasons also prohibit widespread adoption of adaptive management such as institutional risk aversion of looking like a 'failure' and insufficient resourcing, amongst others (Allan et al., 2008;Stults and Larsen, 2020). ...
... How this will change soil moisture capacity and rainfall runoff relationships is largely unknown. Human behavioural change and the complexity of ecosystem responses to these changes is also unknown (Stults and Larsen, 2020). Consequently, consideration of time and money invested in searching for more information needs to be weighed against the benefits extra information will provide. ...
Uncertainty can be an impediment to decision making and result in decision paralysis. In environmental flow management, system complexity and natural variability increase uncertainty. Climate change provides further uncertainty and can hinder decision making altogether. Environmental flow managers express reluctance to include climate change adaptation in planning due to large knowledge gaps in hydro-ecological relationships. We applied a hybrid method of hypothetical scenarios and closed ended questions within a survey to investigate ecological trade off decision making behaviours and cognitive processes of environmental flow managers. The scenarios provided were both similar to participants’ past experiences, and others were entirely unprecedented and hence unfamiliar. We found managers were more confident making decisions in situations they are familiar with, and most managers show low levels of confidence in making trade off decisions under uncertain circumstances. When given a choice, the most common response to uncertainty was to gather additional information, however information is often unavailable or inaccessible–either it does not exist, or uncertainties are so great that decisions are deferred. Given future rainfall is likely to be different from the past, environmental flow managers must work to adopt robust decision making frameworks that will increase confidence in decision making by acknowledging uncertainties. This can be done through tools developed to address decision making under deep uncertainty. Adapting these tools and methods to environmental flow management will ensure managers can begin to consider likely, necessary future trade-offs in a more informed, transparent and robust manner and increase confidence in decision making under uncertainty.
... The third key element is uncertainty. While planning always involves dealing with uncertainty, climate change presents unique challenges to the traditional "predict-then-plan" model of planning because of its complex, stochastic, and nonlinear nature (Abbott, 2005;Stults and Larsen, 2020). For example, although planners often use scenarios to inform future land use development and transportation investment, one "best" scenario is generally preferred by most decision makers (Chakraborty et al., 2011;Hallegatte, 2009). ...
... Fewer than half of the plans consider multiple scenarios (46%), and only a handful of the plans describe scenario planning or consider such approaches (10%). Our findings are consistent with those of Stults and Larsen (2020), who noted that communities still rely heavily on the traditional predict-then-plan model. Some of the plans identify the need to adopt more advanced uncertainty-reduction measures, including adaptive planning/management (10%), robust strategies (2%), incremental or flexible strategies (14%), adaptation threshold (2%), and no-regrets or low-regrets strategies (10%), but these emerging ideas are underdeveloped because none of them are operationalized in the plans. ...
Resilience has increasingly become the principal management priority and planning goal for cities, especially for climate change adaptation. Yet few studies have evaluated whether and how well resilience are integrated into climate change adaptation planning. In this study, we first conceptualized resilience as five key elements (i.e., system, collaboration, uncertainty, coping capacity, and adaptive capacity) and developed a coding protocol based on these key elements. We then used it to evaluate a sample of 50 climate change plans in the United States (US) that has a major adaptation component. We found that the concept of resilience has not been adequately embedded in US climate change plans and that the predominant notions of resilience has limited influence on how well plans integrate resilience. We also found that standalone adaptation plans outperform hybrid plans in addressing uncertainty and fostering systems thinking. Ultimately, major barriers exist in translating the concept of resilience into climate change planning practice. We further offer implications for cities to more effectively plan for climate resilience.
... Additionally, future climate depends on the actions globally taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while a community's future UHI effect depends on urban development trends and behavior. Therefore, the recommended practice for climate change, and more specifically, for urban heat planning, is to show temperature changes under a variety of scenarios (Stults and Larsen 2018). ...
... Planners should try to recognize sources of uncertainty and select strategies that will be beneficial under a variety of different futures wherever possible. It may be especially useful for planners to identify both "no-regret" strategies that would presumably be beneficial regardless of future heat risk, as well as "low-regret" strategies that are beneficial now and under multiple (though not necessarily all) future climate scenarios (Stults and Larsen 2018). Scenario planning could be helpful in identifying which strategies are low-or no-regret. ...
Heat is the number one weather-related killer in the United States. As average global temperatures continue to rise, the threats of both extreme heat events and chronic heat are projected to increase.
Heat disproportionately affects marginalized residents and those who face systematic inequities such as workplace safety, housing quality, energy affordability, transportation reliability, and healthcare access. But planning can shape heat risk. Planners will be key practitioners in helping their communities achieve greater heat resiliency by proactively managing and mitigating heat across the many systems and sectors it affects.
American Planning Association (APA), Planning Advisory Service (PAS) Report 600 provides holistic guidance to help practitioners increase urban heat resilience equitably in the communities they serve. It provides an in-depth overview of the contributors to urban heat and equity implications, and it lays out an urban heat resilience framework and collection of strategies to help planners mitigate and manage heat across a variety of plans, policies, and actions.
Now is the time for the planning profession to step up and take a leading role in coordinating communities' efforts to proactively build urban heat resilience. This PAS Report equips planners with the background knowledge, planning framework, and catalog of comprehensive approaches they need to advance urban heat resilience and create a more equitable and sustainable future in an increasingly urban and warming world.
Available for free at https://www.planning.org/publications/report/9245695/
... Additionally, future climate depends on the actions globally taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, while a community's future UHI effect depends on urban development trends and behavior. Therefore, the recommended practice for climate change, and more specifically, for urban heat planning, is to show temperature changes under a variety of scenarios (Stults and Larsen 2018). ...
... Planners should try to recognize sources of uncertainty and select strategies that will be beneficial under a variety of different futures wherever possible. It may be especially useful for planners to identify both "no-regret" strategies that would presumably be beneficial regardless of future heat risk, as well as "low-regret" strategies that are beneficial now and under multiple (though not necessarily all) future climate scenarios (Stults and Larsen 2018). Scenario planning could be helpful in identifying which strategies are low-or no-regret. ...
Heat is the deadliest weather-related hazard in the United States, posing a growing and inequitable threat to human health, infrastructure, and economic and ecological systems. Communities are getting hotter due to climate change and the urban heat island (UHI) effect. Cities across the country must prepare for unprecedented heat and address systemic inequities in heat risk.
Planners considering urban heat resilience should work to help their communities equitably prepare for and adapt to both chronic and acute heat risk through heat mitigation and management. Heat mitigation includes design and planning strategies that aim to reduce the built environment’s contribution to urban heat, whereas heat management strategies prepare for and respond to heat.
This edition of PAS QuickNotes explains national trends in extreme heat and describes how planners can enhance urban heat resilience for their communities through planning and implementing heat mitigation and management strategies.
https://www.planning.org/publications/document/9219132/
... When planning our cities we need to move beyond predict and plan models and embrace adaptive or robust management approaches [147,267,310]. Ranking risk reduction alternatives will require assessing the risk of maladaptation, making ethical judgements, and evaluating multiple criteria. ...
... Risk management plans are common in local authorities. For example, in the USA, hazard mitigation plans are required by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) [310]. With the recent increasing emphasis on "resilience", organizations may be tempted to create separate "resilience plans" or employ separate "resilience officers". ...
The climate crisis is an unprecedented threat. We urgently need to design our infrastructure, economic, and agricultural systems and our communities to withstand hazards and reduce risk to address this threat. This dissertation contributes by exploring the potential of data-driven urban planning and through increasing our understanding of how risk and data science can be used to build the resilience of our communities. Central to this thesis is the understanding that risk analysis (the assessment, characterization, communication, and management of risk, along with related policy) can enhance urban planning to better mitigate hazards and protect our communities. To improve risk analysis's efficacy for use in urban planning, there are a series of necessary advances to the science of risk (i.e., the knowledge, frameworks, and principles that underlie risk analysis). Each chapter of this dissertation contributes to these advances, including how we focus risk analysis for the betterment of people, how we leverage data science to understand the role of urban form in hazard mitigation, how we incorporate spatiotemporal and behavioral feedbacks into risk analysis, and how we capture resilience within the risk concept. The primary aims of the dissertation were to: 1) Explore the potential for risk science to be used to support urban planning, 2) Advance methods and understanding of spatiotemporal risk analysis, and 3) Propose an operational approach to building the resilience of communities to hazards. The first chapter identifies how urban planning challenges can develop and motivate developments in risk science. I then advance approaches for conducting risk analysis that captures spatiotemporal and behavioral feedbacks using a coupled complex system model in the second chapter. The third chapter uses machine learning and spatial data to explore how urban characteristics are associated with high temperature, that could lead to higher risk. The next section, chapters four and five, focuses risk analysis on people. I propose that the focus of resilience efforts be on the equitable provision of essential services, such as health care, food, and education. Specifically, we can measure how people's access to essential services changes due to a hazard and across demographic groups. The framework I propose can be used by decision makers before, during, and after a hazard to improve the social sustainability and reduce the long-term risk of a community. In the final two chapters I argue that we must explicitly consider the dimension of time in risk analysis and that this means that the pillars of resilience can be addressed within the concept of risk. This understanding, coupled with the other work within this dissertation, means that resilience, and resilience analysis, is well within the purview of modern risk analysis.
... FEMA's Benefit-Cost Analysis (BCA) toolkit is widely used to justify property acquisition as economically viable [11], however it fails to account for data uncertainties. Failing to address uncertainties is not unique to flood risk reduction; it is also common across many forms of climate adaptation community plans [12]. These limitations result in mitigation measures that can be haphazardly administered following a flood event. ...
... Flood exposure and risk are expected to increase due to rapid population and development pressure in vulnerable locations, while uncertain futures require a more robust process [12]. Our research contributes to a growing need for evaluating flood mitigation strategies [33] while also accounting for data uncertainties as a more robust approach. ...
Adopting effective flood mitigation practices for repetitive flood events in the United States, continues to play a prominent role in preventing future damages and fostering resilience to residential flooding. Two common mitigation practices for reducing residential flood risk consist of raising an existing structure to or above base flood elevation (BFE) and acquiring chronically damaged properties in flood prone areas, restoring them back to serve their natural functions as green open spaces. However, due to data accuracy limitations, decision-makers are faced with the challenge of identifying the financially optimal approach to implementing mitigation measures. We address this problem through the following research questions: What does the optimal allocation of flood mitigation resources look like under data uncertainty, and what are the optimal methods to combining mitigation measures with consideration for the best economic benefits? Using a Robust Decision Making (RDM) approach, Tthe effects of uncertainty in property values, construction and demolition costs, and policy implementation options such as structure selection and budget allocation were measured. Results indicate that the amount budgeted for mitigation and how those funds are allocated directly influence the selection of the most economically viable mitigation practices. Our research also contributes to the growing need for evaluating specific flood mitigation strategies.
... Numerous uncertainties, from scientists' imperfect understanding of physical climate processes to unknown future GHG emissions and political responses, make climate change planning difficult (Stults & Larsen, 2018). Many planners' responsibilities entail managing uncertainty, so planners are equipped to address climate uncertainty (Berke & Lyles, 2013). ...
... At a minimum, plans should acknowledge the need for strategies that account for uncertainty. Yet a recent assessment of 44 U.S. adaptation plans found none uses scenario planning or robust strategies (Stults & Larsen, 2018), and resilience plans were even worse in addressing uncertainty . ...
As greenhouse gas emissions and climate change impacts increase worldwide, there is an urgent need for communities, and thus urban planners, to simultaneously mitigate and adapt to climate change. We synthesize recent research to examine whether the field of planning is adequately addressing climate change. We conclude that although there has been progress in recent years, it is insufficient given the scope of the climate change challenge and the myriad ways climate impacts negatively affect communities. We argue for seven principles of strong climate change planning: 1) clear goals; 2) strong fact base; 3) diverse strategies; 4) public participation; 5) coordination across actors, sectors, and plans; 6) processes for implementation and monitoring; and 7) techniques to address uncertainty. For each of these principles we discuss the current state of research and practice.
... Flexible adaptation strategies include actions that preserve future options, contingency plans, no-regret strategies, worst-case strategies, and robust strategies (Quay, 2010). Despite Quay's convincing theoretical argument, most U.S. local climate adaptation plans still rely on predicting-and-planning, and few use scenario planning and flexible adaptation strategies (Stults & Larsen, 2020). ...
... Given the conceptual diversity around uncertainty across disciplines, standardizing both uncertainty language and research-gap terminology in scientific assessment is a challenge. However, given the importance of understanding the state of knowledge for researchers and policy makers, further thought on these issues is critical (Mehta et al. 2019;Stults and Larsen 2018). This methodology is also limited by the inherent subjectivity of the approach. ...
Over three decades, the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) has developed an assessment process to integrate, evaluate, and interpret scientific findings on climate change as well as discuss uncertainties. In six USGCRP assessments, authors identified research gaps, or topics that they indicated required more information or study. Examining research gaps on a continual and systematic basis can aid decisions about research projects, programmatic priorities, and strategic scientific visions. The methodology presented here addresses two aims: 1) identify and categorize research gaps within a searchable database and 2) demonstrate use of the database to inform future science planning and assessment. Results include the top 10 database themes, 18 recurring topics across assessments, and a search example for vulnerability gaps. The benefits and limitations of this approach are discussed, along with recommendations to improve future U.S. climate assessment products.
Significance Statement
The U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) regularly assesses the state of the science of climate change and its impacts in national-level reports written by federal scientists, academic researchers, practitioners, and other experts from across the country. These reports are designed to inform policy choices and decision-making by addressing scientific confidence, uncertainty, and research gaps that limit conclusions. We identified research gaps from six climate reports and organized them into a database with over 1000 entries, spanning more than 300 topic areas. Database entries were also sorted into 22 themes for searchability. The database can be used by students, researchers, and program managers to find open research questions and plan future work.
... Given uncertainty about climate change, much adaptation practice has implemented 'low-regrets' strategies designed to address presentday vulnerabilities (Dilling et al., 2015, Stults andLarsen, 2020). Yet, adaptation actions can produce unintended outcomes for other parts of a system, including reduced adaptive capacity in the future (Cinner et al., 2018, Dilling et al., 2019, Belliveau et al., 2006. ...
Urban water systems need to serve increasing numbers of people under a changing climate. Studies of systems facing extreme events, such as drought, can clarify the nature of adaptive capacity and whether this might support incremental (marginal changes) or transformative adaptation (fundamental system shifts) to climate change. We conducted comparative case studies of three major metropolitan water systems in the United States to understand how actions taken in response to drought affected adaptive capacity and whether the adaptive capacity observed in these systems fosters the preconditions needed for transformative adaptation. We find that while there is ample evidence of existing and potential adaptive capacity, this can be either enabled or diminished by the specific actions taken and their cascading effects on other parts of the system. We also find social dimensions, such as public acceptance, learning, trust, and collaboration, to be as critical as physical elements of adaptive capacity in urban water systems. Finally, we suggest that changes in practices initiated during drought, combined with sustained engagement, collaboration, and education, can lead to substantial and long-lasting changes in values around water, a precursor to transformative adaptation.
... Adaptive management is an excellent way to learn through doing, but ecological responses can lag and may be too slow for water managers to respond to passing thresholds, and therefore should Ecology and Society 28(1): 21 https://www.ecologyandsociety.org/vol28/iss1/art21/ be included as just one part of adaptation (Allen et al. 2011, Perry et al. 2015, Tonkin et al. 2019, Stults and Larsen 2020. ...
Climate change is irreversibly changing the water cycle, yet existing environmental flow assessment methods often fail to recognize the non-stationarity of hydro-climatic systems. Failure to do so will lead to the inability of environmental water management to achieve its ecological targets. Australia has undergone major reform over the past 12 years to recover water from consumptive use for environmental benefit and this paper examines how government agencies responsible for planning and delivery of environmental water establish ecological objectives, and whether there are any barriers to including climate adaptations. We used semi-structured interviews and an online survey of environmental water staff throughout Australia, focusing on southeast Australia, to gather information on methods and perceptions regarding these key issues. The results show water managers perceive current ecological objectives as unachievable and are frustrated by using outdated, government-recommended flow assessment methods. There are many general and industry-specific barriers to climate adaptation that are not insurmountable, yet the current lack of legislative and policy guidance provides little assistance on the best way to respond. We conclude that environmental water planning needs to more formally incorporate climate change considerations along with modelling approaches that can evaluate outcomes under a range of possible future hydro-climatic scenarios to ensure proactive decision making can occur. As the industry currently exists in Australia, it is ill prepared for the challenge of meeting legislated ecological targets under future climates.
... For instance, we found that planners show more positive attitudes toward informal settlement (0.14), indicating that they might be more confident in addressing this long-lasting issue in the plans. By contrast, sea level rise appeared to be a relatively less positive topic, given its low sentiment score (0.05), which might suggest it as a tricky problem for planners because of the uncertainties of climate change and a lack of local adaptive capacity (Stults & Larsen, 2020). We acknowledge that identifying resilience planners' collective attitudes about these topics based only on sentiment analysis does not necessarily translate into their plan priorities. ...
Problem, research strategy, and findings. Planners need to read plans to learn and adapt current practice. Planners may struggle to find time to read and study lengthy planning documents, especially in emerging areas such as climate change and urban resilience. Recently, natural language processing (NLP) has shown promise in processing big textual data. We asked whether planners could use NLP techniques to more efficiently extract useful and reliable information from planning documents. By analyzing 78 resilience plans from the 100 Resilient Cities Network, we found that results generated from topic modeling, which is an NLP technique, coincided to a large extent (80%) with those from the conventional content analysis approach. Topic modeling was generally effective and efficient in extracting the main information of plans, whereas the content analysis approach could find more in-depth details but at the expense of considerable time and effort. We further propose a transferrable model for cutting-edge planners to more efficiently read and study a large collection of plans using machine learning. Our methodology has limitations: Both topic modeling and content analysis can be subject to human bias and generate unreliable results; NLP text processing techniques may create inaccurate results due to their specific method limitations; and the transferable approach can be only applied to big textual data where there are enough sufficiently long documents.
Takeaway for practice. NLP represents a valuable addition to the planner’s toolbox. Topic modeling coupled with other NLP techniques can help planners to effectively discover key topics in plans, identify planning priorities and plans of specific emphasis, and find relevant policies.
... The PIRS methodology was then used to collect, code, and analyze the effectiveness of policies from five city and regional plans using three measures of policy effectiveness. Policies in "plan and adapt" method are theorized to anticipate future flood risk by being (1) robust, that is, protecting assets against multiple projected future flood risk or (2) flexible or low-regret, that is, providing benefits in current flood scenario and providing opportunities for modification or enhancement against future flood scenarios (Hallegatte, 2009;Stults & Larsen, 2020). Thus, robust policies reduce vulnerability to floods in all three scenarios (score ¼ +1 in current, 2050, and 2100). ...
My research goal for the PIRE program was to understand and quantify the flood risk to above ground storage tanks (AST) in the Port of Rotterdam since consequences of AST failure can be catastrophic for the surrounding environment and communities, and the economy. Furthermore, I also wanted to understand the flood risk mitigation approach adopted in the Netherlands to gain insights on how AST flood risk can be managed in the Netherlands. For hurricane risk assessment of ASTs, I used physics-based fragility to estimate the vulnerability of ASTs subjected to inundation depths corresponding to different return periods. The NSF PIRE program components such as meetings with experts and stakeholders helped me understand the flood risk management philosophy in the Netherlands. Site visits and other interactions with experts and students from various disciplines also helped me broaden my perspective on flood risk management using a holistic multidisciplinary approach.
... In what follows we discuss this issue by mainly focusing on urban planning as a prototypical example. We seek to develop the very interesting line of inquiry started in this field by Rittel and Webber (1973) and Christensen (1985), and recently carried forward by, for example, Kato and Ahern (2008), Abbott (2005), Rauws (2017), Savini (2017), Beauregard (2018), Stults and Larsen (2018), Zandvoort et al. (2018), Skrimizea et al. (2019), de Roo et al. (2020b. 2 The background idea is that urban planning problems are almost always connected with severe uncertainty. When this is the case so-called "wicked problems" arise; that is, those problems that are difficult to state consistently and concisely in advance because their understanding and resolution are concomitant with each other (see the already-mentioned seminal work of Rittel and Webber, 1973, and, amongst the subsequent discussions of the issue, e.g., Hajer, Hoppe and Jennings 1993;Koppenjan and Klijn 2004;Balint et al. 2011). ...
Decision-making under uncertainty is sometimes investigated as a homogeneous problem, independently of the type of decision-maker and the level and nature of the decision itself. However, when the decision-maker is a public authority, there immediately arise problems additional to those that concern any other (private) decision-maker. This is not always clearly recognised in orthodox discussions on decisions under conditions of uncertainty. This article investigates the methodological, strategic and procedural challenges of taking public decisions in such conditions. It focuses mainly on decisions involving urban contexts, such as planning decisions regarding land use and building transformations, by trying to develop some pioneering research studies in this field.
... Resilience scholars have applied foresight approaches like scenario planning to articulate alternative futures and experiment with multiple courses of action before implementation (Peterson et al., 2003;Iwaniec et al., 2020). In practice, however, the urban planning community has not yet widely adopted scenario planning or other types of anticipatory techniques to explore the future in climate-planning efforts (Stults & Larsen, 2018). Some authors suggest that, as a management approach, resilience has been implemented in a reactionary rather than anticipatory mode (Vale, 2014). ...
Urban resilience has gained considerable popularity in planning and policy to address cities’ capacity to cope with climate change. While many studies discuss the different ways that academics define resilience, little attention has been given to how resilience is conceptualized across different urban contexts and among the actors that engage in building resilience ‘on the ground’. Given the implications that resilience frames can have for the solutions that are pursued (and who benefits from them), it is important to examine how transformative definitions of urban resilience are in practice. In this paper, we use data from a survey of nine US and Latin American and Caribbean cities to explore how the concept is framed across multiple governance sectors, including governmental, non-governmental, business, research, and hybrid organizations. We examine these framings in light of recent conceptual developments and tensions found in the literature. The results highlight that, in general across the nine cities, framings converge with definitions of resilience as the ability to resist, cope with, or bounce back to previous conditions, whereas sustainability, equity, and social-ecological-technological systems (SETS) perspectives are rarely associated with resilience. There are noticeable differences across cities and governance actors that point to geographic and political variation in the way resilience is conceptualized. We unpack these differences and discuss their implications for resilience research and practice moving forward. We argue that if resilience is going to remain a major goal for city policies into the future, it needs to be conceived in a more transformative, anticipatory, and equitable way, and acknowledge interconnected SETS.
... Despite a wide range of available strategies, a recent review of climate change decision-making concluded that 'the majority of CCRDs [climate change related decisions] are made without formal decision-making tools' [1, p. 8]. In a review of climate change plans, Stults and Larsen found that planners did not use formal strategies, even ones like robust decision-making and scenariobased planning that are common in the academic literature [69]. Several decision-making tools and strategies and their variations are summarized in Table 1 to provide an overview for readers who are new to this literature and to illustrate why choosing from the range of available adaptation decision-making strategies is now a decisionmaking dilemma in its own right. ...
Deciding how and when to adapt to climate change is a difficult problem, involving multiple actors and problem frames, deep uncertainty, and contested goals. Numerous decision-making strategies have been developed to reduce uncertainty, evaluate options under multiple future scenarios, or create decision pathways in an effort to overcome barriers that prevent adaptation decision-making from being a ‘rational’ process: a careful and objective evaluation of how alternative options perform under future conditions. Other fields, such as cognitive science, economics, and psychology, have explored alternatives to rational decision-making such as heuristics, and applied adaptation research has illustrated the role of context in shaping decision-making. This article reviews recent research on adaptation decision-making strategies and highlights gaps that future research should address to inform practice. While decision-making methods and tools have proliferated, there is still a lack of research on how adaptation strategies are selected in practice and a need for research on the meta-decision-making question: How should decision-makers choose which decision-making process to use?
... In addition, the lack of certainties in the SLR projections is also a principal barrier facing coastal communities wanting to invest in adaptations (Hallegatte, 2009;Stults & Larsen, 2018). The proliferation of SLR projections and their uncertainties are likely to confuse coastal planners and policymakers. ...
Sea-level rise (SLR) has drawn unprecedented attention from coastal communities around the world. In fact, many are already being affected and, in response, SLR vulnerability assessments have increasingly emerged in the US as the local communities' first attempt on the adaptation planning agenda. However, to date, little is known about these early planning endeavors in terms of how vulnerability is conceptualized and operationalized. By reviewing the current local SLR vulnerability assessments in the US, we find that most are only focusing on their biophysical exposure to SLR overlooking other important vulnerability factors including sensitivity and adaptive capacity. The limited number of SLR scenarios and the lack of consideration for extreme events are also considered as the major deficiencies. To fill these gaps, we propose a conceptual vulnerability assessment framework to operationalize the full concept of vulnerability and test it through a case study in the Tampa Bay region, Florida. By comparing the vulnerability results of the common practice with our proposed framework, we find large variances in the resulting findings stressing the importance of selecting the proper assessment approach. This paper finally concludes with urban planning and governance implications and future research directions. Coastal planner and managers wanting to improve their understanding of the communities' vulnerability to SLR will benefit from this study.
Given the risk posed by escalating climate conditions, there is a need to assess how localities integrate adaptive planning into hazard mitigation and how this is enabled or constrained by existing planning institutions. We explore this for flood planning in the Lower Rio Grande Valley of Texas, United States – a largely underresourced and highly socioeconomically vulnerable area. Using Natural Language Processing to analyze county and regional hazard plans as well as transcripts of regional flood planning meetings, we find that adaptive planning is largely absent in the study area. Like many localities in the U.S., the communities in the study area have approached flood planning in static terms that do not fully consider future uncertainties; failed to engage diverse participation in planning; and neglected to pursue co-benefits possible with flood mitigation and other sectors. Critically, this may be a product of traditional planning institutions as well as limited local capacities.
Planning for land use and the built environment is critical for flood resilience. Communities that acknowledge and plan for hazards throughout an integrated network of plans are generally more resilient than those where guidance conflicts and hazards are downplayed. Through the spatial evaluation of a community's network of plan documents, a Plan Integration for Resilience Scorecard (PIRS) analysis helps reveal where and how plans are coordinated or in conflict, and where opportunities exist to strengthen resilience. Originally developed in the United States, the method was applied in Rotterdam, Nijmegen, and Dordrecht as part of a National Science Foundation Partnerships for International Research and Education grant. The studies were an occasion for comparisons and knowledge-building, testing the PIRS in a new hazard and planning context, facilitating its continued development, and providing a novel perspective on Dutch plan integration and resilience as the country adjusts to new planning and water management challenges.
This study examines the extent and quality of climate adaptation integration within strategic plans of local governments in British Columbia, Canada. Strategic plans (n = 39) were assessed using plan content analysis in order to understand whether regional planning leads to adaptation action by municipalities. Framed through an institutional resilience lens, we find that regional policy guidance is critical for initiating the uptake of municipal climate adaptation; however, lack of granular adaptation policies informed by appropriate climate data constrains implementation in practice. Through collaboration and leveraging strengths of different levels of government, adaptation barriers can be addressed and the quality of adaptation policies improved.
This chapter assesses observed and projected climate-induced changes in the water cycle, their current impacts and future risks on human and natural systems and the benefits and effectiveness of water-related adaptation efforts now and in the future.
This chapter assesses current climate change impacts on the global and regional water cycle, projected water-related risks for human and natural systems, and adaptation options and effectiveness across scales.
Civic leaders have increasingly relied upon local climate adaptation plans to identify vulnerabilities, prioritize goals, and implement actions to prepare cities for the present and projected effects of global climate change. The concept of sustainability is central to these efforts, as climate adaptation discussions are often framed within the context of economic resilience, environmental protection, and social vulnerability. For urban centers, the climate change issue presents unique challenges for each of these dimensions; however, its potential impacts on marginalized populations are extensive. This study draws from the ‘just sustainabilities’ (Agyeman, Bullard, and Evans 2003) framework and applies the concepts of distributive and procedural justice to examine whether, and to what extent, U.S. cities prioritize social equity concerns in adaptation plans. We perform a qualitative analysis of climate adaptation plans prepared by 22 of the 100 largest U.S. cities. We find that social equity concerns are particularly prominent in local-level climate adaptation discussions relative to those concerning environmental quality and economic development.
This chapter provides a critical reflection on the notions of risk and uncertainty and their relevance in philosophy and in urban planning. Decision making under conditions of risk and of uncertainty are differentiated and discussed from a philosophical perspective. Then, the diverging applications of risk and uncertainty in both philosophy and urban planning are analysed. We hold the view that cities are fundamentally uncertain systems that require new forms of reasoning and innovative methods of scenario building and planning in order to face the challenges of urban uncertainty. An integrated approach towards a philosophy of urban planning is outlined.
Climate change adaptation means that not only do we have difficult decisions to make, but we also need improved ways of making them. Although not new, scenario planning is one tool increasingly being used to improve thinking about climate change and adaptation, reflecting the way it usefully accommodates the mix of certainty and uncertainty, as well as realism and constructivism, which characterise the climate change issue. This paper provides an overview of climate change adaptation and scenario planning, emphasising the existence of conservative and radical approaches to each and the context of multiple epistemological ideals in modern governance. Overall, the paper highlights the framed, or socially constructed, nature of both adaptation and scenario planning and the implications of their intersection.
A study of California's water planning and management process, known as CALFED, offers insights into governance strategies that can deal with adaptive management of environmental resources in ways that conventional bureaucratic procedures cannot. CALFED created an informal policy-making system, engaging multiple agencies and stakeholders. The research is built on data from 5 years of field work that included interviews with participants, review of documents, and observation of meetings. We argue that CALFED can be seen as a self-organizing complex adaptive network (CAN) in which interactions were generally guided by collaborative heuristics. The case demonstrates several innovative governance practices, including new practices and norms for interactions among the agents, a distributed structure of information and decision making, a nonlinear planning method, self-organizing system behavior, and adaptation. An example of a resulting policy innovation, a method to provide real-time environmental use of water while protecting a reliable supply of water for agricultural and urban interests, is described. We outline how ideas about complex adaptive network governance differ from ideas about traditional governance. These differences result in ongoing tension and turbulence as they do for other self-organizing governance processes that operate in a context of traditional governance.
This study examines support for climate adaptation planning and the role of perceived risk, uncertainty, and trust on adaptation of U.S. coastal communities. This assessment is based on the analysis of web-based questionnaires (n = 137) among state, local, and non-government organization (NGO) planners in Alaska, Florida, and Maryland. Ordinal regression and correlation analysis were used to assess which factors are related to support for adaptation during two planning stages. Findings from this study suggest the influence of perceived risk, uncertainty, and trust on support for climate change adaptation (CCA) varies across two stages of adaptation planning (support for the development of plans and willingness to allocate human and financial resources to implement plans). The disaggregation of planning entities into different study areas and levels of management revealed significant differences in the relationship between perceived risk, uncertainty, and trust and support for CCA planning. These findings have implications for the design of communication and engagement strategies.
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 model's 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.
Parties should consider a collaborative approach to scientific inquiry and learning when there are multiple jurisdictions, resource users, and viewpoints about the best way to manage a social-ecological system. A collaborative process provides a forum for scientists, managers, and other stakeholders to raise and explain concerns, articulate management goals, and suggest strategies to address concerns and management actions to achieve goals. Collaborative problem solving engages parties in dialogue that facilitates understanding of different perspectives and creates an opportunity to reframe problems as hypotheses to be tested through the adaptive management process.
I review four potential structures for multistakeholder collaboration that have been used by medium- to large-scale adaptive management programs in the U.S., and identify factors to consider when determining if one of these structures would be appropriate for a particular situation. These mechanisms include: establishing a Federal Advisory Committee, forming a multistakeholder body convened by a nonfederal entity, creating a body through legislation or cooperative agreement, and seeking an exemption from the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA). When designing a collaborative process, parties should consider the degree of collaborative decision making desired, amount of resources that will be required, length of time necessary to design and establish the group, who will make decisions, and how decisions will be made.
The use of scenario planning in urban and regional planning practice has grown in the last decade as one way to face uncertainty. However, in adapting scenario planning from its origins in the business sector, planners have eliminated two key components: (1) the use of multiple scenarios, and (2) the inclusion of diverse organizations, people, and interests through deep deliberations. We argue that this shift limits the ability of planners to plan for multiple plausible futures that are shaped by an increasing number of diverse actors. In this paper, we use case-study research to examine how uncertainty was considered in four scenario-planning processes. We analyzed and compared the cases based on analytical categories related to multiple futures and diversity. We found that the processes that used multiple, structurally distinct scenarios explored a wider range of topics and issues shaping places. All four relied heavily on professional stakeholders as the scenario developers, limiting public input. Only one of the processes that included multiple futures captured the differential effects that scenarios would have on diverse people and interests. Overall, the purpose of the scenario planning drove the participant diversity and ultimately the quality and use of the scenarios.
The adaptation science enterprise has expanded rapidly in recent years, presumably in response to growth in demand for knowledge that can facilitate adaptation policy and practice. However, evidence suggests such investments in adaptation science have not necessarily translated into adaptation implementation. One potential constraint on adaptation may be the underlying heuristics that are used as the foundation for both adaptation research and practice. Here, we explore the adaptation academic literature with the objective of identifying adaptation heuristics, assessing the extent to which they have become entrenched within the adaptation discourse, and discussing potential weaknesses in their framing that could undermine adaptation efforts. This investigation is supported by a multi-method analysis that includes both a quantitative content analysis of the adaptation literature that evidences the use of adaptation heuristics and a qualitative analysis of the implications of such heuristics for enhancing or hindering the implementation of adaptation. Results demonstrate that a number of heuristic devices are commonly used in both the peer-reviewed adaptation literature as well as within grey literature designed to inform adaptation practitioners. Furthermore, the apparent lack of critical reflection upon the robustness of these heuristics for diverse contexts may contribute to potential cognitive bias with respect to the framing of adaptation by both researchers and practitioners. We discuss this phenomenon by drawing upon heuristic-analytic theory, which has explanatory utility in understanding both the origins of such heuristics as well as the measures that can be pursued toward the co-generation of more robust approaches to adaptation problem-solving.
Adverse climate-related pressures and shocks pose uncertain risks to communities and society at large. These uncertainties require strategies that will perform well regardless of circumstances, necessitating robust rather than optimal planning strategies. Robust planning requires reliable up-to-date information. The data available regarding regional risk, however, especially in developing countries, are often insecure, inadequate, or nonexistent. In addition to this, climate change poses deep uncertainty in when, where, and how extreme a given climate-related pressure or shock will occur. In order to include the full breadth of perspectives and consider all possible future scenarios, robust strategies require input from myriad affected stakeholders. Incorporating multiple perspectives, collecting and analyzing risk-related information and selecting a robust strategy, calls for substantial planning and management. When a pressure or shock occurs, without ex-ante action promoting best practices for resilience, governance structures often fail, leading to actions that may favor a single stakeholder agenda and avoidable losses. In contrast, this paper will provide a practical framework for collecting relevant information at the local level, using that information to analyze related risk, and creating robust strategies that incorporate and promote resilience.
There is a pressing need for municipalities and regions to create urban form suited to current as well as future climates, but adaptation planning uptake has been slow. This is particularly unfortunate because patterns of urban form interact with climate change in ways that can reduce, or intensify, the impact of overall global change. Uncertainty regarding the timing and magnitude of climate change is a significant barrier to implementing adaptation planning. Focusing on implementation of adaptation and phasing of policy reduces this barrier. It removes time as a decision marker, instead arguing for an initial comprehensive plan to prevent maladaptive policy choices, implemented incrementally after testing the micro-climate outcomes of previous interventions. Policies begin with no-regrets decisions that reduce the long-term need for more intensive adaptive actions and generate immediate policy benefits, while gradually enabling transformative infrastructure and design responses to increased climate impacts. Global and local indicators assume a larger role in the process, to evaluate when tipping points are in sight. We use case studies from two exemplary municipal plans to demonstrate this method's usefulness. While framed for urban planning, the approach is applicable to natural resource managers and others who must plan with uncertainty.
Quantitative estimates of future climate change and its various impacts are often based on complex climate models which incorporate a number of physical processes. As these models continue to become more sophisticated, it is commonly assumed that the latest generation of climate models will provide us with better estimates of climate change. Here, we quantify the uncertainty in future climate change projections using two multi-model ensembles of climate model simulations and divide it into different components: internal, scenario and model. The contributions of these sources of uncertainty changes as a function of variable, temporal and spatial scale and especially lead time in the future. In the new models, uncertainty intervals for each of the components have increased. For temperature, importance of scenario uncertainty is the largest over low latitudes and increases nonlinearly after the mid-century. It has a small importance for precipitation simulations on all time scales, which hampers estimating the effect which any mitigation efforts might have. In line with current state-of-the-art adaptation approaches, we argue that despite these uncertainties climate models can provide useful information to support adaptation decision-making. Moreover, adaptation decisions should not be postponed in the hope that future improved scientific understanding will result in more accurate predictions of future climate change. Such simulations might not become available. On the contrary, while planning adaptation initiatives, a rational framework for decision-making under uncertainty should be employed. We suggest that there is an urgent need for continued development and use of improved risk analysis methods for climate change adaptation.
Scenarios have become a powerful tool in integrated assessment and policy analysis for climate change. Socio-economic and climate scenarios are often combined to assess climate change impacts and vulnerabilities across different sectors, and to inform risk management strategies. Such combinations of scenarios can also play an important role in enabling the interaction between experts and other stakeholders, framing issues and providing a means for making explicit and dealing with uncertainties. Drawing on experience with the application of scenarios to climate change assessments in recent Dutch research, the paper argues that scenario approaches need to be matched to the frames of stakeholders who are situated in specific decision contexts. Differentiated approaches (top-down, interactive and incident-driven) are needed to address the different frames and decision-making contexts of stakeholders. Future climate and socio-economic scenario development will be shaped by the need to become better aligned with multiple interacting uncertainties salient to stakeholders.
Problem: The practice of scenario planning is often too focused on developing a single preferred scenario and fails to adequately consider multiple uncertain futures. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development recently awarded grants for scenario planning at regional and metropolitan scales that further promote this practice. However, a lack of systematic analysis of uncertainty limits the role of scenario planning.Purpose: The purpose of this article is to demonstrate how to incorporate uncertainty into large-scale scenario analysis and then use that framework to identify contingent and robust plans.Methods: We adapt the concepts of controllable internal options and uncontrollable external forces and consider their interactions in order to develop future scenarios and identify contingent and robust decisions. We then apply this technique using advanced econometric, land use, and transportation models developed for the Baltimore–Washington metropolitan region and its vicinity. Finally, based on the results of a hypothetical, yet plausible, exercise, we show how contingent and robust decisions can help local and regional governments develop contingent and robust plans.Results and conclusions: Scenarios developed as a combination of internal options and external forces allow us to identify a wider range of future impacts than in traditional metropolitan scenario planning. Robust plans support choices that offer benefits across scenarios. Contingent plans can be tailored to specific futures.Takeaway for practice: By providing a way to think systematically about uncertainty, scenario analysis promises to improve the efficacy of large-scale planning.Research support: This article was not directly supported by any outside agency, but support for the modeling system was provided by the following organizations: Maryland State Highway Administration, Maryland Department of Transportation, Maryland Department of Planning, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.
Since the uncertainty that results from insufficient experience is a given, while planning reflects an organizational choice, this study investigates whether effective planning compensates for lack of experience in promoting the adoption of good practices. Analyses of survey data reveal that jurisdictions with the most experience tend to have effective planning and to have adopted good practices. Among jurisdictions with little experience, those with effective planning are significantly more likely to have adopted good practices than those without it. Process-oriented planning activities, such as multidisciplinary simulations and task forces, are more effective than technical activities, such as writing standard procedures. Public agencies can therefore undertake planning activities that increase opportunities to prepare effectively for uncertain future events. -from Authors
There is increasing interest in long-term plans that can adapt to changing situations under conditions of deep uncertainty. We argue that a sustainable plan should not only achieve economic, environmental, and social objectives, but should be robust and able to be adapted over time to (unforeseen) future conditions. Large numbers of papers dealing with robustness and adaptive plans have begun to appear, but the literature is fragmented. The papers appear in disparate journals, and deal with a wide variety of policy domains. This paper (1) describes and compares a family of related conceptual approaches to designing a sustainable plan, and (2) describes several computational tools supporting these approaches. The conceptual approaches all have their roots in an approach to long-term planning called Assumption-Based Planning. Guiding principles for the design of a sustainable adaptive plan are: explore a wide variety of relevant uncertainties, connect short-term targets to long-term goals over time, commit to short-term actions while keeping options open, and continuously monitor the world and take actions if necessary. A key computational tool across the conceptual approaches is a fast, simple (policy analysis) model that is used to make large numbers of runs, in order to explore the full range of uncertainties and to identify situations in which the plan would fail.
A new paradigm for planning under conditions of deep uncertainty has emerged in the literature. According to this paradigm, a planner should create a strategic vision of the future, commit to short-term actions, and establish a framework to guide future actions. A plan that embodies these ideas allows for its dynamic adaptation over time to meet changing circumstances. We propose a method for decisionmaking under uncertain global and regional changes called ‘Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways’. We base our approach on two complementary approaches for designing adaptive plans: ‘Adaptive Policymaking’ and ‘Adaptation Pathways’. Adaptive Policymaking is a theoretical approach describing a planning process with different types of actions (e.g. ‘mitigating actions’ and ‘hedging actions’) and signposts to monitor to see if adaptation is needed. In contrast, Adaptation Pathways provides an analytical approach for exploring and sequencing a set of possible actions based on alternative external developments over time. We illustrate the Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways approach by producing an adaptive plan for long-term water management of the Rhine Delta in the Netherlands that takes into account the deep uncertainties about the future arising from social, political, technological, economic, and climate changes. The results suggest that it is worthwhile to further test and use the approach.
Problem: Human and natural systems will probably have to adapt to climate change impacts, but this cannot be planned for using the traditional approach based on predictions because of the subject's great complexity, its planning horizon more than 50 years away, and uncertainty about the future climate and how effectively CO2 emissions will be reduced.Purpose: This article proposes a more appropriate basis for planning climate change adaptation. Anticipatory governance is a flexible decision framework that uses a wide range of possible futures to prepare for change and to guide current decisions toward maximizing future alternatives or minimizing future threats. Rather than trying to tame or ignore uncertainty, this approach explores uncertainty and its implications for current and future decision making.Methods: I review and summarize the literature on anticipatory governance and provide three case studies to demonstrate its application to climate change planning.Results and conclusions: Denver Water, New York City, and the City of Phoenix are all using scenarios to anticipate the range of global climate changes that may impact their communities and to develop adaptation strategies to address these impacts. Each is developing a decision framework for implementing adaptation strategies incrementally based on climate monitoring. An incremental approach minimizes the resources that must be allocated to address these risks and has allowed these cities to plan in spite of the high uncertainty associated with climate change science and social change.Takeaway for practice: The complexity, uncertainty, and distant planning horizon associated with climate change cannot be managed sufficiently for the traditional predict-and-plan approach to yield good decisions about the significant social and capital investments likely to be required for adaptation. To be successful, social institutions must embrace new methods that explore uncertainty and that provide strategic guidance for current and future decisions.Research support: None.
This paper reviews the concept of adaptive capacity and various approaches to assessing it, particularly with respect to climate variability and change. I find that adaptive capacity is a relatively under-researched topic within the sustainability science and global change communities, particularly since it is uniquely positioned to improve linkages between vulnerability and resilience research. I identify opportunities for advancing the measurement and characterization of adaptive capacity by combining insights from both vulnerability and resilience frameworks, and I suggest several assessment approaches for possible future development that draw from both frameworks and focus on analyzing the governance, institutions, and management that have helped foster adaptive capacity in light of recent climatic events.Research highlights► Adaptive capacity is a central, but often overlooked concept within both vulnerability and resilience frameworks. ► Assessments of adaptive capacity that draw from the benefits of both vulnerability and resilience research can serve to advance theory and application within the field of sustainability science. ► Assessments can be improved by examining governance, institutions, and management preparations for and responses to recent climatic events. ► Additional novel approaches need to be considered for measuring and characterizing adaptive capacity.
Adaptation is a process of deliberate change in anticipation of or in reaction to external stimuli and stress. The dominant research tradition on adaptation to environmental change primarily takes an actor-centered view, focusing on the agency of social actors to respond to specific environmental stimuli and emphasizing the reduction of vulnerabilities. The resilience approach is systems orientated, takes a more dynamic view, and sees adaptive capacity as a core feature of resilient social-ecological systems. The two approaches converge in identifying necessary components of adaptation. We argue that resilience provides a useful framework to analyze adaptation processes and to identify appropriate policy responses. We distinguish between incremental adjustments and transformative action and demonstrate that the sources of resilience for taking adaptive action are common across scales. These are the inherent system characteristics that absorb perturbations without losing function, networks and social capital that allow autonomous action, and resources that promote institutional learning.
We propose a generic framework to characterize climate change adaptation uncertainty according to three dimensions: level, source and nature. Our framework is different, and in this respect more comprehensive, than the present UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) approach and could be used to address concerns that the IPCC approach is oversimplified. We have studied the role of uncertainty in climate change adaptation planning using examples from four Danish water related sectors. The dominating sources of uncertainty differ greatly among issues; most uncertainties on impacts are epistemic (reducible) by nature but uncertainties on adaptation measures are complex, with ambiguity often being added to impact uncertainties. Strategies to deal with uncertainty in climate change adaptation should reflect the nature of the uncertainty sources and how they interact with risk level and decision making: (i) epistemic uncertainties can be reduced by gaining more knowledge; (ii) uncertainties relat
Adapting to climate change is a critical problem facing humanity. This involves reconsidering our lifestyles, and is linked to our actions as individuals, societies and governments. This book presents top science and social science research on whether the world can adapt to climate change. Written by experts, both academics and practitioners, it examines the risks to ecosystems, demonstrating how values, culture and the constraining forces of governance act as barriers to action. As a review of science and a holistic assessment of adaptation options, it is essential reading for those concerned with responses to climate change, especially researchers, policymakers, practitioners, and graduate students. Significant features include historical, contemporary, and future insights into adaptation to climate change; coverage of adaptation issues from different perspectives: climate science, hydrology, engineering, ecology, economics, human geography, anthropology and political science; and contributions from leading researchers and practitioners from around the world.
First published in 1985, Mary Douglas intended Risk and Acceptability as a review of the existing literature on the state of risk theory. Unsatisfied with the current studies of risk, which she found to be flawed by individualistic and psychologistic biases, she instead uses the book to argue risk analysis from an anthropological perspective. Douglas raises questions about rational choice, the provision of public good and the autonomy of the individual.
This chapter illuminates one aspect of the complex risk issue that needs more theoretical grounding before it can become part of a synoptic framework. At this time, we have fairly good knowledge of the prospects and limitations of technical risk analyses; a fairly good understanding of individual risk perception; case study data about institutional management and organizational constraints; a fair amount of data from investigations into the media coverage of risk and its impacts on individual perception; interesting and often challenging essays on social constructions of risk issues; and many studies about social mobilization for political purposes. What appears to be missing, however, is a better understanding of the structural factors that shape interactions among social groups and influence the outcome of social conflicts over risk.
Adaptation planning offers a promising approach for identifying and devising solutions to address local climate change impacts. Yet there is little empirical understanding of the content and quality of these plans. We use content analysis to evaluate 44 local adaptation plans in the United States and multivariate regression to examine how plan quality varies across communities. We find that plans draw on multiple data sources to analyse future climate impacts and include a breadth of strategies. Most plans, however, fail to prioritize impacts and strategies or provide detailed implementation processes, raising concerns about whether adaptation plans will translate into on-the-ground reductions in vulnerability. Our analysis also finds that plans authored by the planning department and those that engaged elected officials in the planning process were of higher quality. The results provide important insights for practitioners, policymakers and scientists wanting to improve local climate adaptation planning and action.
Given what you’ve learned about the system, given your assessment of real or suspected thresholds, the system’s general coping ability, and capacity for transformation—so what? What should you do about it, and what options are available to meet these concerns?
Climate change adaptation – to be politically feasible and socially acceptable – will not happen without broad public support. Yet, to date, the public has been barely engaged in finding effective solutions. Municipal and county staff, as well as community organizations that have taken the lead to date with climate planning, list building political and public support as one of the greatest barriers they face. As climate change impacts increase, and as adaptation measures move from the planning to the implementation stage, those affected by climate risks and adaptation strategies cannot be ignored. The community level is where climate change impacts manifest, where appropriate solutions are needed, and where synergies and trade-offs between mitigation and adaptation, and between climate and nonclimate-policy choices play out. It is in specific locales where people live with the consequences of adaptation choices, and where a sense of place can be a motivation or hindrance to action. Local adaptation experts face a growing need to build capacity in effective stakeholder engagement in responding to climate impacts yet opportunities for doing so have been limited to date. This critical gap must be filled and training programs rapidly brought to scale for adaptation efforts to advance successfully.
The concentration of people, infrastructure, and ecosystem services in urban areas make them prime sites for climate change adaptation. While advances have been made in the development of frameworks for adaptation planning and in identifying both real and potential barriers to action, empirical work evaluating urban adaptation planning processes has been relatively piecemeal. Existing assessments of current experience with urban adaptation provide necessarily broad generalizations based on the available peer-reviewed literature. This paper uses a meta-analysis of U.S. cities’ current experience with urban adaptation planning drawing from 54 sources that include peer-reviewed literature, government reports, white papers, and reports published by non-governmental organizations. The analysis specifically evaluates the institutional support structures being developed for urban climate change adaptation. The results demonstrate that adaptation planning is driven by a desire to reduce vulnerability and often catalyzes new collaborations and coordination mechanisms in urban governance. As a result, building capacity for urban climate change adaptation planning requires a focus not only on city governments themselves but also on the complex horizontal and vertical networks that have arisen around such efforts. Existing adaptation planning often lacks attention to equity issues, social vulnerability, and the influence of non-climatic factors on vulnerability. Engaging city governments and communities in adaptation planning – whether to initiate or expand such efforts – may require that adaptation planning is framed to capitalize on their motivation to protect assets and reduce vulnerability.
'Risk Governance is a tour de force. Every risk manager, every risk analyst, every risk researcher must read this book - it is the demarcation point for all further advances in risk policy and risk research. Renn provides authoritative guidance on how to manage risks based on a definitive synthesis of the research literature. The skill with which he builds practical recommendations from solid science is unprecedented.' Thomas Dietz, Director, Environmental Science and Policy Program, Michigan State University, USA "A masterpiece of new knowledge and wisdom with illustrative examples of tested applications to realworld cases. The book is recommendable also to interested students in different disciplines as a timely textbook on 'risk beyond risk'." Norio Okada, Full Professor and Director at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute (DPRI), Kyoto University, Japan 'There are classic environmental works such as The Tragedy of the Commons by Hardin, Risk Society by Beck, The Theory of Communicative Action by Habermas, and the seminal volumes by Ostrom on governing the commons. Renn's book fits right into this series of important milestones of environmental studies.' Jochen Jaeger, Professor at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada 'Risk Governance provides a valuable survey of the whole field of risk and demonstrates how scientific, economic, political and civil society actors can participate in inclusive risk governance.' Jobst Conrad, Senior Scientist, Social Science Research Center Berlin, Germany 'Renn offers a remarkably fair-minded and systematic approach to bringing together the diverse fields that have something to say about 'risk'. Risk Governance moves us along the path from the noisy, formative stage of thinking about risk to one with a stronger empirical, theoretical, and analytical foundation.' Baruch Fischhoff, PhD, Howard Heinz University Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, USA 'I cannot describe how impressed I am at the breadth and coherence of Renn's career's work! Written with remarkable clarity and minimal technical jargon… [this] should be required reading in risk courses!' John Graham, former director of the Harvard Risk Center and former deputy director of the Office of Budget and Management of the Unites States Administration This book, for the first time, brings together and updates the groundbreaking work of renowned risk theorist and researcher Ortwin Renn, integrating the major disciplinary concepts of risk in the social, engineering and natural sciences. The book opens with the context of risk handling before flowing through the core topics of assessment, evaluation, perception, management and communication, culminating in a look at the transition from risk management to risk governance and a glimpse at a new understanding of risk in (post)modern societies.
This paper investigates the challenges of tackling multiple uncertainties in strategic plan implementation. Through a case study of a planned urban extension in the east of England, the paper examines the approaches that were adopted to tackle different types of uncertainties, including value uncertainties, organisational uncertainties and external uncertainties. The findings suggest that strategic, sub-regional plans are particularly vulnerable to external uncertainties, and that it is difficult to address external uncertainties through contingency plans, given the impact of political changes on the legitimacy of value assumptions underpinning each plan period. Nevertheless, the findings indicate the importance of mature, multi-actor partnership arrangements for development plan-making and implementation, which can facilitate the mitigation of organisational uncertainties following implementation failure. This implies that effective plan implementation is less about the circumvention of undesirable uncertainties, and more about the capacity to deal with the ongoing, recurring emergence of multiple uncertainties.
Climate change poses new challenges to cities and new flexible forms of governance are required that are able to take into account the uncertainty and abruptness of changes. The purpose of this paper is to discuss adaptive climate change governance for urban resilience. This paper identifies and reviews three traditions of literature on the idea of transitions and transformations, and assesses to what extent the transitions encompass elements of adaptive governance. This paper uses the open source Urban Transitions Project database to assess how urban experiments take into account principles of adaptive governance. The results show that: the experiments give no explicit information of ecological knowledge; the leadership of cities is primarily from local authorities; and evidence of partnerships and anticipatory or planned adaptation is limited or absent. The analysis shows that neither technological, political nor ecological solutions alone are sufficient to further our understanding of the analytical aspects of transition thinking in urban climate governance. In conclusion, the paper argues that the future research agenda for urban climate governance needs to explore further the links between the three traditions in order to better identify contradictions, complementarities or compatibilities, and what this means in practice for creating and assessing urban experiments.
Climate change is not 'a problem' waiting for 'a solution'. It is an environmental, cultural and political phenomenon which is re-shaping the way we think about ourselves, our societies and humanity's place on Earth. Drawing upon twenty-five years of professional work as an international climate change scientist and public commentator, Mike Hulme provides a unique insider's account of the emergence of this phenomenon and the diverse ways in which it is understood. He uses different standpoints from science, economics, faith, psychology, communication, sociology, politics and development to explain why we disagree about climate change. In this way he shows that climate change, far from being simply an 'issue' or a 'threat', can act as a catalyst to revise our perception of our place in the world. Why We Disagree About Climate Change is an important contribution to the ongoing debate over climate change and its likely impact on our lives.
This paper provides practical experience with two climate impact and adaptation assessment methods: Real-In-Options (RIO) optimisation and Adaptation Tipping Points (ATP). These methods were selected because they both provide insight into and promote the ability of the system to deal with future change and thus can be used within a resilience approach. The resilience approach takes a dynamic perspective on adaptive processes and the effects of these processes at/across different spatio-temporal scales. Although the two methods share a similar aim, they have considerable differences in orientation and application. RIO optimisation aims to minimise the expected costs of acquiring climate change resilience. To achieve this aim, it uses probabilistic climate data to identify the optimal set of adaptive strategies in response to advances in knowledge about future climate change. The ATP method is virtually independent of climate change scenarios, and in particular of probabilities of climate change. Rather, it requires input from decision makers and other stakeholders to select the preferred adaptive strategy. This paper discusses the concept, procedures, case examples and benefits/limitations of each method, examining its usefulness for informing adaptation-related decision making. Based on this, it gives specific recommendations on which method to use under what circumstances.
In the Australian policy context, there has recently been a discernible shift in the discourse used when considering responses to the impacts of current weather extremes and future climate change. Commonly used terminology, such as climate change impacts and vulnerability, is now being increasingly replaced by a preference for language with more positive connotations as represented by resilience and a focus on the 'strengthening' of local communities. However, although this contemporary shift in emphasis has largely political roots, the scientific conceptual underpinning for resilience, and its relationship with climate change action, remains contested. To contribute to this debate, the authors argue that how adaptation is framed-in this case by the notion of resilience-can have an important influence on agenda setting, on the subsequent adaptation pathways that are pursued and on eventual adaptation outcomes. Drawing from multi-disciplinary adaptation research carried out in three urban case studies in the State of Victoria, Australia ('Framing multi-level and multi-actor adaptation responses in the Victorian context', funded by the Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research (2010-2012)), this article is structured according to three main discussion points. Firstly, the importance of being explicit when framing adaptation; secondly, this study reflects on how resilience is emerging as part of adaptation discourse and narratives in different scientific, research and policy-making communities; and finally, the authors reflect on the implications of resilience framing for evolving adaptation policy and practice.
Since the mid-20th century, most large cities of the United States have been warming at more than twice the rate of the planet as a whole. While many municipal and state governments have developed climate action plans designed to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases, rising concentrations of greenhouse gases typically are not the strongest driver of warming in cities. Our purpose is to evaluate the likely effectiveness of municipal and state level climate action plans in slowing the pace of warming in the most populous U.S. cities over the near-to-medium term. We employ time-series temperature trend analyses to differentiate global from local-scale climate change mechanisms in large U.S. cities between 1961 and 2010. We then review all climate action plans developed at the municipal or state level in the 50 most populous metropolitan regions to identify the various emissions control and heat management strategies incorporated into these plans. The results of our assessment suggest that the climate change management policies adopted through municipal and state climate action plans may fail to adequately protect human health and welfare from rapidly rising temperatures. Based on our review, we recommend that municipal and state governments broaden climate action plans to include heat management strategies in addition to greenhouse gas emissions controls.
The concepts of planning and uncertainty are closely linked. The purpose of this research was to examine and learn from practice by applying the concept of planning as managing uncertainty to the making of a metropolitan plan for Greater Vancouver, Canada. The Livable Region Strategic Plan was prepared between 1989 and 1996. The story of this plan-making process is a dynamic interplay of expected and desired outcomes, actions and proposed actions, and uncertainties. This provides insights about the nature of metropolitan planning and about how to improve practice and planning outcomes.
This paper critically assesses a series of scenario planning exercises in the Washington Metropolitan region and the State of Maryland within a broad and evolving framework of participatory planning. Reality Check, as the exercises were called, were a daylong set of activities using tools that encouraged stakeholder participation to develop scenarios focused on long-term regional sustainability. The paper draws upon planning theory, participant reactions, media reports, post-exercise outcomes and author's experiences of shaping the process. It illustrates how the model was adapted to multiple scales and contexts, and variations in desired technical complexity. The paper concludes that such processes have an inherent value in capturing the issues of the future and in creating awareness and knowledge. It argues that certain considerations such as early strategic engagement of stakeholders, flexibility of technical tools and diversity among organizers, all played a role in enhancing the dialogue. Furthermore, it suggests that when timed with favorable external conditions and designed within suitable institutional frameworks, they have the potential to provide a foundation from which tangible regional benefits can be realized.
A critical planning task is recognizing and addressing uncertainty. Actual problems vary in uncertainty over means and ends. If people agree on what they want and how to achieve it, then certainty prevails and planning is rational application of knowledge. If they agree on what they want but do not know how to achieve it, then planning becomes a learning process; if they do not agree on what they want but do know how to achieve alternatives, then planning becomes a bargaining process; if they agree on neither means nor ends, then planning becomes part of the search for order in chaos. Each prototype situation suggests a particular range of planning styles. Planners should tailor their styles to problem conditions.
In this study, evolutionary theory is used to analyze and critique the strategic process of scenario planning. We argue that scenario planning can be strengthened as a theory- and practice-oriented process through the incorporation of evolutionary theory in the scenario narrative process, and in the subsequent implementation phases in response to environmental change. First, this paper addresses scenario planning in relation to theoretical perspectives on strategic planning and forecasting. Then, the concepts of variation, selection, retention, organizational learning and inertia are used to analyze scenario planning as a strategic process. This study argues that because scenario planning mirrors modes of variation and selection at the organizational level, evolutionary theory is a useful approach for assessing the plausibility of scenario narratives and strengthening the theoretical foundation of scenario planning as a process. By utilizing an evolutionary framework throughout the scenario planning process, this method has a better chance of encouraging exploratory strategic thinking without reinforcing non-blind variation or inertial practices. Concepts including inertia can also be used to better address bias and myopia in the scenario planning process. Additionally, evolutionary theory can be used to assess how entities learn from the outcomes of scenario planning as the environment changes over time.
THIS REVIEW EXPLORES BOTH ECOLOGICAL THEORY AND THE BEHAVIOR OF NATURAL SYSTEMS TO SEE IF DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES OF THEIR BEHAVIOR CAN YIELD DIFFERENT INSIGHTS THAT ARE USEFUL FOR BOTH THEORY AND PRACTICE. THE RESILIENCE AND STABILITY VIEWPOINTS OF THE BEHAVIOR OF ECOLOGICAL SYSTEMS CAN YIELD VERY DIFFERENT APPROACHES TO THE MANAGEMENT OF RESOURCES. THE STABILITY VIEW EMPHASIZES THE EQUILIBRIUM, THE MAINTENANCE OF A PREDICTABLE WORLD, AND THE HARVESTING OF NATURE'S EXCESS PRODUCTION WITH AS LITTLE FLUCTUATION AS POSSIBLE. THE RESILIENCE VIEW EMPHASIZES DOMAINS OF ATTRACTION AND THE NEED FOR PERSISTENCE. BUT EXTINCTION IS NOT PURELY A RANDOM EVENT: IT RESULTS FROM THE INTERACTION OF RANDOM EVENTS WITH THOSE DETERMINISTIC FORCES THAT DEFINE THE SHAPE, SIZE AND CHARACTERISTICS OF THE DOMAIN OF ATTRACTION. THE VERY APPROACH, THEREFORE, THAT ASSURES A STABLE MAXIMUM SUSTAINED YIELD OF A RENEWABLE RESOURCE, MIGHT SO CHANGE THESE CONDITIONS THAT THE RESILIENCE IS LOST OR IS REDUCED SO THAT A CHANCE AND RARE EVENT THAT PREVIOUSLY COULD BE ABSORBED CAN TRIGGER A SUDDEN DRAMATIC CHANGE AND LOSS OF STRUCTURAL INTEGRITY OF THE SYSTEM. A MANAGEMENT APPROACH BASED ON RESILIENCE, ON THE OTHER HAND, WOULD EMPHASIZE THE NEED TO KEEP OPTIONS OPEN, THE NEED TO VIEW EVENTS IN A REGIONAL RATHER THAN A LOCAL CONTEXT, AND THE NEED TO EMPHASIZE HETEROGENEITY. THE RESILIENCE FRAMEWORK DOES NOT REQUIRE A PRECISE CAPACITY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE BUT ONLY A QUALITATIVE CAPACITY TO DEVISE SYSTEMS THAT CAN ABSORB AND ACCOMMODATE FUTURE EVENTS IN WHATEVER UNEXPECTED FORM THEY MAY TAKE.
The planning field has been criticized in recent years for neglecting time and the future in favor of present-focused decisions about space. How should planners proceed to put the future back in planning? Each of the four authors contributing to this symposium brings a different perspective to bear. Sam cole reviews the contributions of contemporary work in the futures field and provides a helpful resource list. Martin Wachs discusses the similarities and differences between forecasting and envisioning, and he provides a commentary on what this means for the identity of planning. Dowell Myers presents a demographic futures perspectives that emphasizes alternative interpretations of graphic trends. He illustrates this with regard to California's growing Latino population and the impacts it will have on building denser and more compact cities. Linda Dalton provides a commentary on the preceding papers and finds ample room for expanding planners' emphasis on the future, both in practice and in accredited planning education. Returning to an emphasis on the future could help to make planning seem more appealing and relevant to both, citizens and decision makers.
This paper provides a systematized overview of patterns in the scenario planning literature published in the last decades. Recently, scenario planning has enjoyed a revival, apparent in the ‘boom’ in published research on the matter. Consequently, a major issue that needs to be addressed is how to organize the literature along precise lines. A number of reviews that describe the current status of the body of literature and knowledge on scenario planning have made attempts to respond to such requirements. These studies agree that systematizing the existing literature is a necessary step in developing the field. This paper aims to contribute to this purpose. The review of the academic literature here conducted is thought to be useful for both academics and practitioners. For researchers, this systematic overview will be constructive not only in providing an analysis of the directions of published research but also in setting up a research agenda for the future. For managers and practitioners, it provides a clear outline of firm-related articles and discusses their contribution from a managerial point of view. It also raises awareness with regard to future analytical methods, and in particular, to scenario planning and its potential contribution to the competitiveness of firms. The research was carried out under the research Project Enterprise of the Future of the University of Aveiro.
Human agency is considered a key factor in determining how individuals and society respond to environmental change. This article synthesizes knowledge on agency, capacity, and resilience across human development, well-being, and disasters literature to provide insights to support more integrated and human-centered approaches to understanding environmental change. It draws out the key areas of agreement across these diverse fields and identifies the main points of contestation and uncertainty. This highlights the need to consider subjective and relational factors in addition to objective measures of capacity and to view these as reflexive and dynamic, as well as differentiated socially and temporally. These findings can help distinguish between coping, adaptation, and transformation as responses to environmental and other stressors.
In this study, a large-scale integrated modeling system (IMS) was applied for supporting climate change impact analysis and adaptation planning of the energy management system in the Province of Manitoba, Canada. The system was based on the integration of the fuzzy-interval inference method (FIIM), inexact energy model (IEM), and uncertainty analysis. Issues concerning energy management systems planning for cost-effective adaptation strategies under climate change were generated. Decisions of energy allocation, power generation and facility expansion within a multi-facility, multi-option, and multi-period context were obtained. Tradeoffs among system cost, climate change impact, system reliability and resilience were analyzed. The obtained solutions would be helpful for the adjustment or justification of the existing allocation patterns of energy resources and services, the long-term planning of renewable energy utilization, the formulation of local policies regarding energy consumption, economic development, and energy structure, the analysis of interactions among economic cost, system efficiency, emission mitigation, and energy-supply security, and the investigation of system vulnerability and responses towards various levels of impacts under climate change. Thus, IMS could provide an effective technique for decision makers in examining and visualizing integrated impacts of climate change on energy management systems as well as identifying desired adaptation strategies under multiple levels of uncertainties (i.e., the uncertainties associated not only with climate change impact analysis, but also with adaptation planning).
A national, representative survey of the U.S. public found that Americans have moderate climate change risk perceptions, strongly support a variety of national and international policies to mitigate climate change, and strongly oppose several carbon tax proposals. Drawing on the theoretical distinction between analytic and experiential decision-making, this study found that American risk perceptions and policy support are strongly influenced by experiential factors, including affect, imagery, and values, and demonstrates that public responses to climate change are influenced by both psychological and socio-cultural factors.