Adelphi Research

Every city is unique and complex. Examples include its geography, decision-making context, and climate-related risk profile. At the same time, each city shares similarities with other cities. The same applies to counties. Complex climate-related risks are increasing in cities in the EU. This makes the transfer of effective adaptation and mitigation measures between cities increasingly important, especially as time and funding for local case studies are limited. It is uncontroversial that transfer between similar cities, or similar counties respectively, is more probable. Systematic approaches to support this transfer are rare.One way to reduce complexity in the world, and across such units of analysis, is by looking for patterns. Using a well-established data-driven methodology with a cluster analysis at its core, we identify and analyze recurrent patterns of multiple climate-related risks across urban areas, and derive what urban planning and design can do about it. We do this for 1152 NUTS-3 (county level) units covering over 99% of the EU area using over ten spatially explicit datasets on exposure to climate-related exteme events (for drought, heat, landslide, wildfires, air pollution, and flooding types) and exposure to sea-level rise.In the resulting spatially explicit typology, each of the eight clusters, or groups, consists of NUTS-3 units which have similar combinations and degrees of multiple climate-related hazards. Each group was then comprehensively statistically analyzed and characterized. Then we derived and suggested combinations of areas for action and adaptation measures for decision-making in each group to focus on for reducing combined climate-related risks. On a city-and county level this supports urban planners and authorities, on a regional level political decision-making, and on an EU level strategically scaling up climate action.For example, one group of NUTS-3 units exhibits the most pronounced dryness, alongside high heat hazard and highest wildfire exposure, in parts of France, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Croatia, Romania, and Bulgaria. On this basis, we suggest integrating measures from action areas such as heat action plans, nature-based solutions to multiple hazards simultaneously, as well as public health measures, water management and science-based risk assessments and subsequent adaptation plans.The climate-risk related typology is supplemented by three further EU-wide NUTS-3 level typologies based on 5-8 datasets each: contribution to mitigation, urban morphology, and capacity for action. This allows for a highly detailed and interdisciplinary storyline for understanding risk in each county, and county group, through a lens of urban planning.The study was conducted in the Horizon EU project UP2030 (Urban Planning 2020, https://up2030-he.eu/). The results can be found here at https://urbanplanningfor2030.eu/form/urban-typologies. The methodology is interdisciplinary, drawing from climate risk assessment, governance, geography, and urban planning and dialogues between ten urban authorities. We also show that the methodology is also applicable to mitigation problems, and is applicable to other spatial units, such as ecosystems, conservation areas, or grid cells.

This deliverable summarizes the proceedings of the policy dialogues conducted between June and October 2022 in the framework of SocialRES Project.

ZusammenfassungAnpassungskapazitätsbewertung ist ein methodisch anspruchsvolles Feld. Zentrale Herausforderungen sind a) die Komplexität und Vielfalt an Wirkbeziehungen und Faktoren, die eine Rolle spielen und in der Einschätzung berücksichtigt werden müssen; b) die Notwendigkeit, ohne verlässliche Trends in die Zukunft zu blicken; c) das Erfordernis, Potenziale zu bewerten statt real messbarer Tatbestände. Die bundesweite Klimawirkungs- und Risikoanalyse 2021 (KWRA 2021) präsentiert eine Weiterentwicklung bestehender Analysen, welche die Herausforderungen betreffend Komplexität, Zukünftigkeit und Potenzialcharakter über verschiedene methodische Ansätze zu reduzieren versucht. Die Analyse umfasst Betrachtungen auf sektoraler und generischer Ebene und stellt diese durch die Verwendung von sechs Anpassungsdimensionen in einen gemeinsamen methodischen Kontext. Auch auf kommunaler Ebene steigt die Forschungstätigkeit an, bisher bestehen dort allerdings nur vereinzelte Anpassungskapazitätsbewertungen. Als Vorschlag für die Kategorisierung der Anpassungskapazität auf kommunaler Ebene wenden die Verfassenden die sechs Dimensionen der Bundesebene auch hier an.

SummaryWolf populations are recovering and expanding across Europe, causing conflicts with livestock owners. To mitigate these conflicts and reduce livestock damages, authorities spend considerable resources to compensate damages, support damage prevention measures, and manage wolf populations. However, the effectiveness of these measures remains largely unknown, especially at larger geographic scales. Here we compiled incident-based livestock damage data across 21 countries for the years 2018, 2019 and 2020, during which 39,262 wolf-caused incidents were reported from 470 administrative regions. We found substantial regional variation in all aspects of the data, including the primary target species, the density of damages, their seasonal distribution, and their temporal trend. More than half of the variation in damage densities across regions is explained by the area of extensively cultivated habitats occupied by wolves and namely natural grasslands and broad-leaved forests. Regional variation in husbandry practices and damage prevention, while difficult to quantify at a continental scale, appear important factors to further modulate these incidents. As illustrated with detailed data from Germany, for instance, the relationship between the number of wolf units and damages is diminishing over time, suggesting some adaptation of livestock owners and local authorities to their presence, for example by increasing prevention efforts. As we argue, temporal trends of damage incidents, which are robust to variation in data collection across regions, are thus informative about the local intensity of the wolf-human conflict. We estimated increasing trends for the majority of regions, reflecting the current expansion of wolves across the continent. Nonetheless, many of these increases were moderate and for more than one third of all regions, trends were negative despite growing wolf populations, thus indicating that wolf-livestock conflicts can be successfully mitigated with proper management.

ABSTRACT Impacts of global climate change will primarily be felt through the water cycle. Adaptation to changing conditions in transboundary basins is an important precondition to ensure regional sustainable development and political stability. However, adaptation measures in one basin country can affect water resources and adaptation options elsewhere, therefore often requiring coordinated or joint responses by riparian countries. The paper examines the potential of climate policy instruments in strengthening adaptation to changes in transboundary river basins in North America’s Colorado River Basin and Southern Africa’s Orange-Senqu River Basin. It finds that climate policy instruments are yet rarely employed to jointly manage adaptation in shared rivers but nonetheless harbour great potential.

PurposeThis paper aims to present the “Vulnerability Sourcebook” methodology, a standardised framework for the assessment of climate vulnerability and risk in the context of adaptation planning. The Vulnerability Sourcebook has been developed for the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) and has been applied in more than twenty countries worldwide.Design/methodology/approachIt is based on a participative development of so-called climate impact chains, which are an analytical concept to better understand, systemise and prioritise the climate factors as well as environmental and socio-economic factors that drive climate related threats, vulnerabilities and risks in a specific system. Impact chains serve as the backbone for an operational climate vulnerability assessment with indicators based on quantitative approaches (data, models) combined with expert assessments. In this paper, the authors present the concept and applications of the original Vulnerability Sourcebook, published in 2015, which was based on the IPCC AR4 concept of climate vulnerability. In Section 6 of this paper, the authors report how this concept has been adapted to the current IPCC AR5 concept of climate risks.FindingsThe application of the Sourcebook is demonstrated in three case studies in Bolivia, Pakistan and Burundi. The results indicate that particularly the participative development of impact chains helped with generating a common picture on climate vulnerabilities and commitment for adaptation planning within a region. The mixed methods approach (considering quantitative and qualitative information) allows for a flexible application in different contexts. Challenges are mainly the availability of climate (change) and socio-economic data, as well as the transparency of value-based decisions in the process.Originality/valueThe Vulnerability Sourcebook offers a standardised framework for the assessment of climate vulnerability and risk in the context of adaptation planning.

Although it is increasingly recognised that higher education institutions have to play a critical role in the progression towards a sustainable development, the question of what fields and issues universities should attend to in their attempt to become more sustainable remains subject to debate. In recent years, sustainability assessment tools have begun to play a prominent role in strategies to reorient higher education institutions systematically and holistically towards sustainability. In the course of their further advancement, sustainability assessment tools have not only become instrumental facilitators of change processes towards sustainability, but also established implicit normative standards by framing the overall understanding of what fields and issues a sustainable university should engage with. So far, researchers in the field have paid little attention to the understandings of a sustainable university that are underpinning and informing sustainability assessment tools. This paper addresses this gap. Based on a comparative analysis of indicators and criteria, as well as introductory passages in supporting documents of twelve sustainability assessment tools, the authors sketch the dominance and marginalisation of different fields and issues. In doing so, the paper contributes to building the capacity for a more sophisticated and reflexive engagement with different approaches to assess and evaluate sustainability in higher education institutions.