Adapting to Climate Change in Europe

Exploring Sustainable Pathways - From Local Measures to Wider Policies

Hans Sanderson,Mikael Hildén,Duncan Russel,Gil Penha-Lopes,Alessio Capriolo

• Publisher: Elsevier
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780128498750
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Meteorology & Climatology

Adapting to Climate Change in Europe: Exploring Sustainable Pathways - From Local Measures to Wider Policies is a scientific synthesis of a four-year project on adaptation activities in Europe.It combines scientific assessments with real-world case descriptions to present specific tools and methods. This book aims at ensuring sustainable solutions in adaptation to climate change. The challenge of adaptation is still at an early stage; this bookfills relevant gaps in current knowledge on climate adaptation, providing a crucial set of tools to support effective decision-making. It acts as a guide topractitioners and decision-makers along different steps of on-going adaptation processes. Adapting to Climate Change in Europe contains methods and tools for improving stakeholder's participation and analyzing costs and benefits of different adaptation measures. It is an essential resource for researchers, graduate students, and experts and policymakersworking in climate change and adaptation.

• Features real world case studies providing a tool for comparative learning
• Fulfills the current knowledge gap in climate change adaptation
• Includes top-down economic models allowing for a novel application and integration of adaptation features in European and global models
• Provides in-depth analysis of participation using new empirical material and approaches

Chapter 1

Introduction

Hans Sanderson¹ and Mikael Hildén²,    ¹Aarhus University, Roskilde, Denmark,    ²Finnish Environment Institute, Helsinki, Finland

1.1 Rationale—Needs to Bridge the Knowledge Gaps

The impacts of a changing climate are likely to disrupt many ecological, social, and economic systems. Some regions and sectors in Europe are likely to suffer greater adverse effects than others, whereas some may see new opportunities emerging. Within regions, both beneficial and adverse developments are possible, depending on the sector, season, and local conditions. In all situations, adaptation to climate change presents a critical challenge to society.

The EU adaptation strategy (EC, 2013) highlighted the need for new knowledge on adaptation. The progress of climate change has not halted and the Paris Agreement from the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) further highlights the importance of adaptation. The 17 Sustainable Developmental Goals adopted by the UN in 2015 (UN, 2015) also raise the issue of adaptation to climate change—Goal 13 demands urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts. It notes that “affordable, scalable solutions are now available to enable countries to leapfrog to cleaner, more resilient economies. The pace of change is quickening as more people are turning to renewable energy and a range of other measures that will reduce emissions and increase adaptation efforts” (http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/climate-change-2/).

The high-level goals raise key questions on what specific knowledge is needed and how adaptation knowledge production, as well as actual adaptation, can be enhanced. This book fills a particular knowledge gap by bringing together insights from real action at the local level to improve adaptive capacity and resilience, with the broad-brush analysis of global and regional models of adaptation and analyses of policies that frame the actions. This dual view provides new insights into the challenges of adaptation.

This book expands on the knowledge of the social and economic benefits of adaptation measures for sectors of great economic importance in Europe, and addresses issues and needs in policy making. The chosen approach bridges the gap between top-down adaptation assessments and planning, and bottom-up local and contextual expert knowledge. The book brings together insights gained from 23 case studies across Europe, and five additional ones from across the world. A specific focus is on the economic assessments behind the adaptation measures, as well as participatory efforts and the policy dimension of adaptation.

The EU Adaptation Strategy (EC, 2013) encourages Member States to develop national and regional adaptation strategies, and it stresses the need to build a knowledge base on climate change impacts and vulnerability, including the sharing of existing data and information (among stakeholders) through platforms such as Climate-ADAPT (http://climate-adapt.eea.europa.eu/). The sharing of knowledge and learning is necessary as adaptation has been proven to be a multisector and multiscale decision-making problem, characterized by substantial uncertainty. Uncertainties arise both with respect to the actual impacts of climate change but also with respect to the wider developments in society. These uncertainties and ambiguities present critical challenges for the development of robust adaptation strategies.

When designing adaptation policies, decision-makers are faced with particular and still unresolved difficulties, in addition to the complexities common to all climate policies. This context, the understanding of policy efficiency, is a critical issue. Empirical studies utilizing cost–benefit and multicriteria analysis of climate change adaptation measures are increasingly used to shed light on the efficiency of adaptation policy measures. Integrated economic modeling used in this book has shown that uncertainty in future socioeconomic scenarios could significantly affect adaptation cost estimates, which in Europe could vary between €30 and 50 billion in 2050, but the uncertainties are significant. The fact that knowledge on the benefits and costs of adaptation is still limited, not systematic, and unevenly distributed across sectors and countries, makes it difficult to assess and justify adaptation options. Moreover, there are difficulties in determining how to address the equity of impacts and adaptation policies and measures; proactive adaptation necessitates accepting costs today to avoid greater future costs.

Uncertainties related to the underlying impacts of climate change, as well as to those impacts associated with proposed preventive interventions, create difficulties for the design and choice of adaptation options. The complexity of climate change adaptation calls for a multilevel, multisectoral, and multiactor governance approach. Adaptation is a process whose characteristics are sector-, scale-, society-, and ultimately time-specific. The policies necessary to promote successful adaptation need to consider both the impacts and the related adaptive responses from a bottom-up perspective—e.g., there is a considerable gap between the research effort on integrated assessment models for guiding adaptation, and context-specific local adaptation. At the heart of the problem is the need to understand how interactions between top-down and bottom-up approaches add another layer of complexity to adaptation processes. It is still far from clear how one should deal with uncertainties embedded in all adaptation actions, and with the challenges that arise from the “bottom-up” nature of adaptation. Adaptation pathways that allow for gradual progress and learning are likely to provide one of the ways forward in responding to these challenges to develop an adaptation narrative and common storyline in planning and managing adaptation.

Models supporting adaptation should ideally build on high-quality data, but in practice models are often based on aggregate and unsatisfactory data coverage. Model outputs should therefore not be taken at face value. The reliability of the analyses can greatly benefit from refining the data input and through the critical assessment of the appropriate scale of analysis, which accounts for in-depth understanding that can be gained from bottom-up case study analysis. There is also a need to improve the design of bottom-up analyses to strengthen the lessons learned from individual case studies and to ensure comparability between them. The dialogue between modeling that generalizes and aggregates the detailed study of cases that explore context-dependent situations can overcome critical knowledge gaps.

Citizen and stakeholder participation is an important way to anchor adaptation measures in the local context. In some countries and instances, policy makers have struggled to engage citizens and stakeholders, while at the same time the latter do not feel heard or included in the decision-making process. New tools and approaches that can promote the engagement and involvement of citizens and stakeholders should therefore continue to be explored. Improving the articulation between bottom-up and top-down analysis should allow for a more comprehensive assessment of the critical choices that have to be made, and for pin-pointing the appropriate point of intervention to achieve robust, cost-effective climate change adaptation policies. A comprehensive review of case studies can help to find ways of integrating adaptation strategies into sectors, which may have different needs, constituencies, vulnerabilities, and risks.

The litmus test of successful adaptation policies and measures lies in the “real” world implementation. It faces conflicts over existing sector policy objectives, time and resource constraints, as well as competing priorities among implementers. Policy strategies balancing human well-being, ecosystem services, and economic growth present further challenges. Top-down strategies may lead to a mismatch between national and regional adaptation policy needs, and the more context-specific adaptation measures needs required at local scales. Top-down adaptation strategies are typically based on aggregate costs and benefits across sectors to reach nation-wide economic figures. The challenge is thus to avoid a “one size fits all” policy approach, which is not sufficiently sensitive to actual environmental, social, and economic characteristics and climate change impacts in specific localities and sectors (the bottom-up perspective). Top-down strategies frequently fail to embrace and/or foster bottom-up processes. Bottom-up processes usually require trust, raised through community building, and include knowledge sharing, codesign of local decisions between citizens, policy makers, and other stakeholders. Moreover, they require more integral adaptation measures and implementation with consequent feedback and participatory actions.

A systematic generation of empirical data allows for a combination, revision, and development of sectorial and integrated economic assessment models with real-world data in place of default model assumptions, thus improving the predictability of these. There is also a need for frameworks to allow for the systematic analysis of adaptation policies, and for examining the significance of policies at case level. Such frameworks can be used to characterize different policy areas and to identify challenges in the relationship between and within EU and national policies, as well as opportunities and barriers in relation to the implementation of policies at a local level. This analyses should elucidate why and how adaptation evolves differently across Europe. Such analyses are needed in the development of meaningful broad regional adaptation strategies such as the EU’s 2013 Adaptation Strategy. The strength of the EU Adaptation Strategy lies in its effort to mainstream adaptation into all relevant policy areas. But this also requires information on conflicts and synergies of adaptation policies at different levels of policy making with other policies (including climate change mitigation) within and between sectors.

1.2 The Aim of This Book

The overall aim of this book is to provide a much-needed research-based overview of adaptation in action. It has three specific aims. First, it brings together new information on the background and justification to adaptation. Second, it reconciles the bottom-up nature of adaptation with top-down strategic analysis and policy making. Third, it identifies topics and challenges for future adaptation research.

To strengthen the base for adaptation, this book makes new results on benefits and costs of adaptation accessible and compiles and collates information that so far has been unevenly spread across sectors and countries. To fulfill the aim of bridging the gap between top-down and bottom-up analyses and actions, the book shares experiences on how the availability of specific knowledge, integration, and utilization can be improved, provides insights into how stakeholder participation can be promoted and strengthened, and examines how coherent, multilevel, multisector integrated adaptation policies can be developed.

Adaptation research is challenging. Climate change has short- and long-term impacts, local socioecological context and specific vulnerabilities are relevant, and complex networks of causes and effects and a wide diversity of adaptation capacity of local regions make it difficult to compile and integrate empirical data and information. The book demonstrates how different disciplines and approaches can be brought together to achieve faster learning, innovation, and robust decision-making.

Taken together the goal is to support the emergence of informed and well-designed adaptation measures and policies that evolve dynamically with adaptation needs and capacities. With the accompanying twitter handle @EUAdaptation we also encourage readers to go to the BASE website (www.base-adapt.eu) for further information, models, and data.

1.3 Approach and Structure

The book consists of seven main chapters. This chapter, is the introduction. Chapter 2, Storylines and Pathways for Adaptation in Europe, sets the scene by providing an overview of storylines and pathways for adaptation in Europe. Chapter 3, The Diversity of Adaptation in a Multilevel Governance Setting, focuses on the diversity of adaptation in a multilevel governance setting. Chapter 4, Upscaling the Impacts of Climate Change in Different Sectors and Adaptation Strategies, addresses the challenges of upscaling climate impacts in different sectors. In Chapter 5, Economy Wide Impacts of Climate Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies Across European Regions, economy-wide impacts of climate mitigation and adaptation strategies across European regions are explored. Chapter 6, Analyzing the Policy Framework for Climate Change Adaptation, explores the policy implications of the insights that have been gained, and outlines possible future policy developments. Chapter 7, Conclusion, provides a synthesis of the themes and topics covered.

Each chapter identifies and compares different methodological frameworks and analytical assessments that support learning from diverse approaches and actual applications. Frequent references are made to the 23 in-depth case studies that were at different stages of the adaptation cycle and that illustrate multilevel governance scales and/or multisectoral cases across Europe and beyond.

Each chapter shows different aspects and ways of tackling the availability of information, internalization of intangible and nonvalued goods and services, treatment of uncertainty, monitoring, short- versus long-term time horizons, incremental versus transformational adaptation, and intergenerational responsibilities. Of particular interest is the combination of challenges that full economic assessments have to deal with in order to support robust policies and decisions. Different ways of valuing benefits, costs, effectiveness, and efficiency, among others parameters, are explored within the confines of the availability of data and information. The use of economic assessment to support decision-making is discussed in the light of descriptions of sectoral and intersectoral models that have been calibrated/developed and linked to the case studies.

The chapters also reflect on the need for ground-truthing of the model parameterization assumptions in light of high-quality comparable empirical evidence from real-world case studies. The empirical knowledge gathered from the 23 case studies, combined with a generic assessment of numerous implemented adaptation measures, provides a robust base for sectoral and upscaling modeling and better comprehension of the challenges at national, regional, and European scale. Finally, given the diversity of case studies, the book also comments on a suite of different tools and methods that can be applicable to different stages of adaptation with respect to economic assessments, prioritization, adaptation pathways, adaptation storyline, participatory methods, and policy.

References

1. UN. (2015). Sustainable development goals – United Nations [WWW Document]. U.N. Sustainable Development. http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/ (accessed 6.25.17).

2. EC. An EU strategy on adaptation to climate change. COM. 2013;2013 2016 final.

Chapter 2

Storylines and Pathways for Adaptation in Europe

Mikael Hildén¹, Ad Jeuken² and Marianne Zandersen³, ¹Finnish Environment Institute, Helsinki, Finland, ²Deltares, Delft, The Netherlands, ³Aarhus University, Roskilde, Denmark

Abstract

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Table of contents

• Cover image
• Title page
• Table of Contents
• Copyright
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Introduction
• Chapter 2. Storylines and Pathways for Adaptation in Europe
• Chapter 3. The Diversity of Adaptation in a Multilevel Governance Setting
• Chapter 4. Upscaling the Impacts of Climate Change in Different Sectors and Adaptation Strategies
• Chapter 5. Economy-Wide Impacts of Climate Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies Across European Regions
• Chapter 6. Analyzing the Policy Framework for Climate Change Adaptation
• Chapter 7. Conclusion
• Glossary
• Author Index
• Subject Index