On 24-25 November 2016 I had a chance to return to Guangzhou and present the findings on my research on the governance of climate change adaptation in the cities of the Pearl River Delta to an audience of scholars and practitioners from the Guangdong Province and Municipality of Guangzhou, gathered as part of a small workshop organised by the TU Delft - South China University of Technology Joint Research Centre 'Urban Systems and Environments'. The workshop was intended to facilitate a two-way dialogue between academia and practice. The goal was double: (1) to enhance the uptake of solutions, ideas and concepts from scholarly research by the local governments and (2) vice versa, to gather inputs from the practitioners on what are their knowledge gaps and core challenges faced by the cities in the region from the point of view of environmental and climate change impacts and the need to develop new models for more sustainable urbanisation. I was pleased to receive some stimulating and to-the-point feedback, particularly on the recommendations for policy and practice stemming from my research, as well as some challenging questions (inviting a degree of much welcome reality-check) which I intend to reflect upon when writing the forthcoming papers. In the meantime, please take a look at the summary of the said findings and implications for practice outlined in the presentation from the workshop.
0 Comments
Together with Dominic Stead and with crucial input from Peter van Veelen (acting as a chair/discussant), we organised an interesting session at the recent Adaptation Futures 2016 conference in Rotterdam (10-13 May 2016). The conference was huge, with about 1700 participants, and extremely rich in excellent presentations and discussions. The session we organised "Devising Solutions to Adaptation Challenges in Cities" was intended to stimulate a debate on urban adaptation between the researchers and practitioners. The presentations from the session are available here, while below you will find a summary of the contributions and the debates that followed. Being home to half of humanity and concentrating most of the global economic activities and assets, cities are particularly vulnerable to climate change impacts. Efforts to adapt to those impacts, however, face a combination of spatial, institutional, economic and social challenges calling for innovative solutions spanning across sectoral and disciplinary boundaries. This session explored the causes of and the potential solutions for overcoming these challenges from a range of perspectives: from flood risk management, economic modelling, vulnerability mapping, to spatial planning, and stakeholder engagement. Drawing comparisons between cases from across the world, from China, Europe, North America and Africa, this session stimulated a lively and insightful debate. Faith Chan’s (Nottingham Ningbo University) stressed that future coastal flood risk is surprisingly ignored in the highly vulnerable Chinese coastal megacities. He advocated exploring opportunities to re-think and connect the current coastal management, shoreline land use and climate change adaptations strategies, which should be accompanied by better public participation, education, and raising awareness of the growing flood risk. In a similar vein, my presentation (co-authored by Dominic Stead, Feng Yu and Jinghuan He) stressed the governance challenges in the cities of the Pearl River Delta, focusing on the insufficiently recognised flood risk that stems both from climate change effects and the unprecedented urbanisation at break-neck speed. Their work underscored the importance of vertical and horizontal coordination for better integration between spatial planning and flood risk management and for stimulating the urban governments’ willingness and ability to devise adaptation strategies. The research also highlighted the role of institutions, ideas and conflicting interests and policy priorities among the key stakeholders for understanding and building the capacity of cities to adapt to climate change. Lars de Ruig (VU Amsterdam) and colleagues also looked at flood risk and assessed the potential damage and risk in Los Angeles for various sea level rise scenarios. They devised a model for evaluating the cost/benefit ratio for the different adaptation measures, from large hydraulic engineering project to small-scale resilience measures, which could indeed be extremely useful for risk assessment and planning of adaptation measures. Then, Marco Hoogvliet (Deltares), by contrast, examined the often-overlooked question of the involvement and role of the construction companies in urban adaptation actions. He argued that these crucial actors are under-represented in the adaptation policy networks in The Netherlands and called for building a healthy market for adaptation measures in which innovation would be rewarded with commissions for construction. This could indeed boost the adaptation agenda and promote more innovation in this field. Shifting the focus to Africa, Vanesa Castan Broto (UCL) critically analysed the participatory planning exercise in Maputo, Mozambique, intended to develop climate change adaptation plans for the city’s neighbourhoods. She argued that participatory planning was vital for institutional development, as it focused on a people-oriented approach to urban governance. Drawing lessons from this research, she argued for municipal governments to embrace participatory methodologies as a means to build cross-sector partnerships and improve the efficacy of planning in addressing the needs of the people living in informal settlements. Finally, moving back to The Netherlands, Frank van der Hoeven and Alex Wandl’s produced detailed risk assessment and vulnerability maps for Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect in Rotterdam. To achieve this they drew on a combination of methods (from remote sensing, crowd sensing, GIS and 3D modelling, to regression analysis) and incorporated a variety of factors from temperature to social and physical characterics. The resulting social and physical heat maps and the underlying data paint a fine-grained and nuanced picture of the mechanisms that make urban residents vulnerable to heat waves, providing useful insights and tools for planners. The stimulating debate on these issues was expertly led by Peter van Veelen (TU Delft), who benefits from a double perspective on the adaptation issue having worked on it both in academia and for the Municipality of Rotterdam. The debate revolved mainly around two cross-cutting issues. First, it focused on the role and meaning of scientific research for urban adaptation for practice and the ways in which it could better support and inform urban adaptation strategies. Is academic work on adaptation in tune with the needs of the practitioners? Are academics doing enough to communicate their findings and ideas across to the practitioners’’ side? The comments tended to emphasise need to engage more boldly in the dialogue between the two communities, even though several commentators (most notably Dominic Stead, TU Delft), stressed that in reality this dialogue was happening already and the boundary between the worlds of academia and practice war more or less fluid, depending on the organisation and the attitudes of the individual researchers and local government officials. Second, the debate focused also on the governance and institutional challenges touched upon in several of the contributions, and on the ways to overcome them. These solutions should indeed be pragmatic and based on an acknowledgement of the limitations of the institutional systems (which are hard to change). At the same time, they should seek ways to work with the already noted positive trends and seek opportunities to engage the stakeholders in closer collaboration around the already hotly debated issues that could be strategically linked (e.g. waterlogging, urban redevelopment as opposed to expansion, regenerating urban nature) and to promote the urban design features sought after by the developers and inhabitants alike that also help to reduce flood risk. Blue-green infrastructure or multi-functional water storage and barriers that are already being put in place in cities like Ningbo, Shenzhen or Hong Kong, are not labelled as climate adaptation but rather as features creating an attractive and marketable urban environment. That being said, they could well serve as adaptation goals, particularly if they were recognised as adaptation measures by the local governments, practitioners, construction companies and the inhabitants, and also integrated into the wider strategies for urban development and, importantly, into the criteria for tendering and development of new urban areas or renewal of the existing ones. Moreover, several of the presentations provided useful ideas on how to overcome the said challenges. The speakers underlined the importance of efforts on awareness-building, concerning both the costs of the damage caused by climate change and the opportunities that adaptation may bring in other fields (e.g. improvement of spatial quality for instance). These efforts should be aimed not only towards the local and regional governments, but also developers, builders and the wider urban communities, as was advocated by Hoogvliet. De Ruig’s presentation, in turn, provided a potentially crucial tool for calculating the actual future costs of non-adaptation and the damages incurred by the raising sea level, which could help convince the reluctant decision-makers to think beyond the 4 or 5 year electoral horizon. Likewise, the work by van der Hoeven & Wandl demonstrated the usefulness of multivariable mapping of climate change vulnerability for informing risk assessment efforts and devising more integrated interventions to mitigate this risk. Finally, Castan Broto stressed the need to acknowledge that even micro-level bottom-up actions can add up to a significant improvement in urban adaptation capacity and overcome institutional weaknesses, which led her to advocate greater involvement of the local communities in adaptation planning. This reflected Hoogvliet’s argument, drawn from observations in Rotterdam, that encouraging a multitude of even small scale infrastructural or architectural adaptation features - through regulation, incentives and pro-active stakeholder engagement – can add up to a big change. §More evidence on the links between extreme weather events and human activity emerges. Physicists from Oxford have published an interesting piece of research in nature climate change providing evidence that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions are partly to blame for the disastrous flooding in England during the winter of 2013/2014 leading to losses of GBP 451 billion. They found that "human influence increased the risk of low pressure northwest of Britain and the number of days with zonal flow over the North Atlantic and increased the risk of heavy precipitation in southern England." See more information here and the full article here. Photo: Paul Grover/Telegraph
A new collaborative paper, co-authored by myself, Maria Francesch-Huidobro, Yuting Tai, Faith Chan and Dominic Stead, and entitled "Governance challenges of flood-prone delta cities: Integrating flood risk management and climate change in spatial planning" has been accepted for publication in Progress in Planning and is published online ahead of print (click here). In the article we argue that Delta cities are increasingly exposed to the risks of climate change, particularly to flooding. As a consequence, a variety of new spatial development visions, strategies, plans and programmes are being developed by city governments in delta regions to address these risks and challenges. Based on a general conceptual framework, this paper examines the nature of visions, strategies, plans and programmes in the delta cities of Hong Kong, Guangzhou and Rotterdam which are highly exposed to flooding and connected through a network of epistemic communities. The paper follows two main lines of inquiry. First, it examines the terms, concepts, and dominant institutional characteristics associated with the development of these visions, strategies, plans and programmes as a way of constructing a conceptual framework for understanding and explaining their connectivity. Second, it explores how and why cities’ spatial plans and governance dynamics are shaping climate adaptation responses. The systematic development of conceptual frameworks and in-depth analyses of varied, representative case studies is needed as their findings have important implications for vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in terms of policy options and cities as the optimal level for adaptation. The paper finds that dominant institutional characteristics critically affect the steering capacity of organisations/agencies (including their coordination capacity) to address climate-related risks. The findings have important implications for vulnerability and adaptation to climate change in cities, in general and delta cities, in particular. I hope that you will find it worthwhile. Below I include some "making of" photos from the meetings of the Authors to work on this paper... M. Francesch-Huidobro, et al.. Governance challenges of flood-prone delta cities: Integrating flood risk management and climate change in spatial planning. Progress in Planning (2016), http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.progress.2015.11.001 I have just published a short piece in English and Chinese on why cities should consider adaptation to climate change impacts in their spatial strategies and what it entails. Please see the document below.
I presented my research on governance challenges in climate change adaptation in the Dutch and Chinese delta cities as a lecture at a symposium organised by the Urban Studies Foundation (USF) at the University of Glasgow. You can see the video here. By the way, videos from the lectures of other USF fellows – Cecilia Dinardi on creative cities, Michele Lancione on life at the margins in Bucharest, and Sarah Barns on data-driven cities – are available here. Their research is truly excellent, so do have a look. For some climate change black humour, see this list of 10 places to visit before they are severely hit by flooding induced by the changing climate.
Below you will find a a video presentation introducing my research project. It provides some background to the study and explains why it matters and how it is being carried out. There has been a lot of coverage of the latest report by the IPCC, which stressed the urgency of taking action to curb emissions and adapt to the climate change impacts, thus there is no point in repeating it here. However, it is interesting to peek into the process of drafting a summary report with policy recommendations that required approval and some intensive smoothening of the conclusions. Economist has recently published a sobering account of this process: "It works as follows. The authors write a draft summary. Each sentence of the draft is projected onto a big screen in a giant hall. Officials then propose changes to the text; authors decide whether the changes are justified according to the full thousand-page report. Eventually a consensus is supposed to be reached, the sentence is approved or rejected, the chairman bangs a gavel and moves on to the next sentence." Given that decisions are taken on unanimity basis, nearly three quarters of the initial text written by the academics involved was redrafted and watered down after a long and painstaking, and frankly ridiculous wrangling among the governments and then between them and the academics: "In the final day of discussions in Berlin, the delegates turned to a set of figures showing emissions by countries classified by income group (rich, middle-income, etc). A group of countries, led by Saudi Arabia, said the figures should be deleted. European countries objected. The authors suggested taking the figures out of the summary but putting in a reference instead to the underlying report where the figures remain (officials may not alter the main report). The Saudis said no. The Netherlands suggested adding a footnote saying: “The Netherlands objects to the deletion of the following figures [then a list of them].” No dice. Eventually, in the early hours of the morning, Saudi Arabia got its way." Against this background, the decisions by some cities and regions to go ahead with ambitious climate change policies, ignoring the lack of progress and meaningful decisions at the international level, seem particularly wise. The full article is available here. I presented the first early findings from the research conducted in the Dutch Randstad at the 2014 RSA Global Conference in Fortaleza, Brazil. In my talk, I argued that the administrative system and national institutional characteristics are fundamentally important factors determining how cities and urban regions address climate change challenge. At the same time, I demonstrated, drawing on the Randstad case, that implementation of climate change policies does have important feedback effects on the patterns of governance in the urban regions, namely in terms of increasing cross-level and cross-sectoral collaboration observed. However, these changes should also be understood as part of a wider trend of transformation of the state and paradigm shift towards decentralisation and withdrawal of the state to share the responsibility for public policy delivery with the citizens (local authorities), business and other non-state actors. This trend has recently been exacerbated by the austerity measures resulting from the global economic crisis. Thus, climate change policies are not the root cause of these shifts in governance, but are no doubt a catalyst for them. Finally, I stressed the numerous and sometimes paradoxical obsctacles and bottlenecks for climate change governance in the Randstad stemming from the institutional legacies and conflicting ideas and interests. For more details please see the presentation below.
|
AuthorMarcin Dąbrowski, Researcher at TU Delft Categories |