Climate Change Adaptation in Cities: the conditions for success

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of development Syntheses of afd studies and research

Until recently, the actions to promote climate change adaptation have mainly taken the form of occasional projects for reducing vulnerabilities (infrastructures for rain drainage, early-warning systems, etc.). But for greater effective action, it is better to both develop real public policies dedicated to this theme and to incorporate this concern into the other sectoral policies and in national strategies.

To this end, AFD launched three research projects to grasp a better understanding of the conditions needed for effective adaptation.

The three studies look into the institutional, political, and social factors that make for success or failure in adaptation programs on a city scale. The cities studied were selected because they have initiated adaptation procedures that enable feedback not only on how adaptation has been taken into account within local priorities, but also on the implementation of strategies, which represents a relatively new research subject.

The study Institutional Pathways for Local Climate Adaptation was produced by South African academics from the University of Cape Town and University of KwaZuluNatal in 2012-2013. It identifies the political, institutional and social dimensions of effective adaptation at the municipal level, in three South African cities (Durban, Cape Town, Theewaterskloof).

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For cities to protect themselves against climate change, strong political commitment is of course necessary. But just this is not enough: A panoply of institutional, strategic and social factors is also required.

This article presents the conditions—as identified by three AFD-commissioned research studies on the topic—needed for local adaptation policies to be a success.

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FEEDBACK FROM SUB-SAHARAN AFRICA, SOUTH AFRICA, AND COLOMBIA

Climate Change Adaptation in Cities: the conditions for success

African

Financial, human and technical constraints

cities at risk due to sea - level rise

Firstly, the municipalities studied are still very dependent on international support for launching adaptation initiatives.

% of national urban population in urban LECZ

The positive aspect of this observation is that they are, as a result, involved in partnerships with international actors with which exchanges may be very beneficial. For example, in South Africa, “Successful adaptation almost always includes a form of partnership among the municipality and the donors, research institutions, and NGOs.” However, municipalities would benefit from creating partnerships with associations, research groups, businesses, universities and local think tanks that are capable of strengthening their support role for local initiatives.

The negative aspect of this dependence is that municipalities significantly lack financial and human capacities in the area of adaptation. Attribution of funding in this area is often made at the national and regional level and is still too rarely distributed on the municipal level.

Non LECZ 0.0 - 5.0 5.1 - 10.0 10.1 - 15.0 15.1 - 20.0 20.1 - 25.0 > 25.0

Local management of funding (at the municipal or community level) is nonetheless a key point in capacity building for cities with regard to climate governance and often turns out to be more effective than funding national strategies; indeed, cities often understand local issues better and provide more appropriate responses to them.

Small Intermediate Big Population of cities Small: 100,000 - 500,000 Intermediate: 500,000 - 1 milion Big: more than 1 milion

Km 0

1.000

2.000

Furthermore, municipalities lack capacities for finding new funding. An expert from a Colombian consulting firm explains that “The main issue is that of making the [adaptation] plan one of the funding priorities of the city, and of making it so that the municipal employees learn to look for sources of funding (not necessarily from the central government) and ultimately learn how to create projects in order to access these resources.”

Data source: Coastal Analysis Data Set utilizing GRUMP beta population and land area grids (CIESIN, 2005), Low elevation Coastal Zone created from SRTM elevation grid (CIESIN, 2006). GRUMP (Global Rural - Urban Mapping Project) is a project of the Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN) at the Earth Institute, Columbia University.

LECZ: Low Elevation Coastal Zones are land areas that are contiguous with the coast and ten meters or less in elevation.

All grids 1km resolution.

Source : UN-HABITAT Global Urban Observatory 2008

The 2014 study Understanding the Assessment and Reduction of Vulnerability to Climate Change in African Cities by the British research institute International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) is more sociological and concerns social vulnerability to climate change in African cities, especially in poor neighborhoods (case studies in Kampala, Accra, and Dakar).

Municipalities also lack tools and scientific data on the climate at a local level, reinforcing the feeling of uncertainty and consequently leading to the lack of action by many local actors.

To make up for this lack of data, the City of Cape Town asked a university research team to take the national climate change projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and express them on a local scale, in order to obtain more precise information on local risks.

Finally, in 2013 the Colombian research institute Fedesarrollo and the Institut de recherche et débat sur la gouvernance (IRG) produced the set of documents Ciudades y cambio climático en Colombia, which contains an institutional analysis of climate change management in 11 Colombian cities, as well as a summary of concrete feedback specifically on mitigation and adaptation in these cities, from the point of view of governance.

The lack of “quantitative” data can be partially compensated by qualitative evaluations. In some African cities, the participative evaluation tools turned out to be very effective for reconstructing climatic events and for evaluating their relative severity and the changes they have caused in society. The researchers point out the complementarity of these data with the quantitative data, in order to guide decision-makers’ adaptation choices.

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The success of an adaptation action or policy depends on whether it has been taken into account tangibly in local strategies and on how effectively it has been implemented.

The three studies highlight the many obstacles to success in these two steps as well as the way in which the cities studied overcame them.

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Development and climate adaptation: a counterproductive separation

The close relationship between adaptation and risk management—a cross-cutting competence already recognized by municipalities—has also facilitated a relatively integrated approach to the issue of adaptation.

In South Africa, the right to development is a deeply-rooted notion. Politicians know this and cannot allow themselves to vote environmental measures or the adoption of new “sustainable norms,” as people expect progress to be made in economic development beforehand. This is what researchers call “the environment and development divide.” As one of them declares, “Adaptation is not yet conceptualized as an imperative of development.” A direct consequence of this divide is the often negative connotation of adaptation, all the more so because the initiatives related to climate change are dealt with by the municipalities’ environmental authorities.

The coming together of development and adaptation objectives also involves improved coordination among the services concerned by climate change: planning, water, transportation, risk management, etc. The Colombian experience shows that measures to coordinate these services are difficult to set up. Coordination with the central government is often very weak, and that with regional authorities still in its infancy or non-existent, despite national impetus for the creation of regional working groups.

Furthermore, the public institutions do not have a monopoly on action in adaptation matters: We must also consider the interactions of the public institutional actors with the private and social actors (businesses, NGOs, etc.), without which the institutions would not be able to take up the issue of adaptation (Launay and O’Riordan, 2013).

Yet, when development and adaptation objectives come together within existing sectoral strategies or policies (that are not specifically environmental), it is one of the surest ways to ensure the effective and sustainable continuation of adaptation measures. This is why several Colombian cities, such as Bogota and Montería, have chosen to explicitly include adaptation in their local development plans.

THE CONDITIONS FOR SUCCESS IN ADAPTATION POLICIES Put on the agenda Obstacles

Put into action

Separation of environmental and development • Mostly external funding of adaptation • issues • Difficulties in funding attribution • Financial and human constraints Political backing too limited in the medium-long • term / political changes • Insufficient political backing Lack of data at the local level on risks Financial and human constraints • • Problems of coordination (city/government Lack of training for municipal teams and of • and • cities/regions) citizen education

• Long period of adaptation Levers

Events (disasters, World Cup, COP17...) as • windows of opportunity

Importance of international and local • partnerships / capacity building, consultation

• Will to innovate and carry out pilot projects Importance of local and international • partnerships

• Incorporation into pre-existing policies and plans • Political will, leadership by one or more persons • Custom-made initiatives • Territorial and integrated outlook / planning

Policies launched in response to local • considerations Combination of scientific data and social data • (fieldwork surveys)

Ségolène Davin

Sabrina Archambault

Consultant for the Collectivités locales et développement urbain Division, AFD

Project manager, Collectivités locales et développement urbain Division, AFD

MARION JOUBERT

Irène Salenson

Project manager, Collectivités locales et développement urbain Division, AFD

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Research officer, Recherches et développement Division, AFD

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Insufficient political backing In sub-Saharan Africa, including in South Africa, only a few local elected officials have taken up the issue of adaptation. In Colombia, few local actors are involved in an ongoing way in the working groups on climate change; this is due especially to political change, but also to the too low frequency of meetings, which causes discontinuity in policies and projects as well as a loss of “institutional memory” and technical capacities.

This lack of political backing can be explained by lack of knowledge of what is at stake with climate change at all levels of governance, as well as by the contradiction between the short terms of office of elected municipal officials and the medium or long term needed for setting up effective adaptation projects that are based on accurate data, a detailed analysis, and the working out of concerted action plans, etc.

However, events (natural disasters, international conferences on the climate, etc.) sometimes enable certain politicians to come to a realization of the stakes involved and force them to put the topic on the agenda. The challenge is then to make interest in the issue last beyond these windows of media visibility.

Several “champions of climate change” are emerging thanks to local initiatives. In Theewaterskloof, South Africa, for example, a group of around 15 local key figures, politicians, heads of businesses, and simple farmers has legitimized initiative-taking in adaptation. Even though political backing at a high level is important, this is not enough: A local initiative inspired by the people, or at least backed by them, has greater chances of being effective than a “top-down” adaptation policy that is not operational. The researchers state that political authorities must support legitimate and effective citizen initiatives, because these latter are inspired “by” the communities “for” themselves. They mention initiatives backed by the municipa-

lities, by international development cooperation agencies, by the academic world, or by local associations: initiatives dealing in building and drainage infrastructures, reforestation, etc.

Municipal authorities must facilitate, pass on, or even fund these initiatives in order to meet a locally identified need.

Furthermore, the issues of climate change vulnerability must be incorporated into the overall urban planning approaches (urban design, urban transportation plans, etc.) in order to stir up more significant ripple effect.

Conclusion Without dwelling on the already familiar debates on climate change adaptation by cities, these three studies focus—each in a different way—on describing the social contexts that make cities vulnerable, as well as on analyzing the recent institutional attempts at adaptation, whatever their scale and state of progress: national policies, regional programs, and citizen initiatives.

The issue of adaptation remains complex and still rarely dealt with. The restrictive perspective of adaptation is concerned mainly with agricultural issues and the management of water resources. Based on the reflections stemming from these research projects, AFD proposes four recommendations for better adaptation by cities (see Focus below). These are similar to the more overall recommendations on sustainable urban development, but the major challenge is precisely to incorporate the adaptation issues into urban and territorial planning approaches.

focus Four recommendations for climate change adaptation by cities: Provide technical and financial capacity building for municipalities; BIBLIOGRAPHIC REFERENCES Dodman, D., K. Soltesova, D. Satterthwaite and C. Tacoli (to be published), Understanding the Assessment and Reduction of Vulnerability to Climate Change in African Cities: A focus on low-income and informal settlements, AFD, Paris.

IPCC (2014), Fifth Assessment Synthesis Report, Geneva.

Launay, C. and E. O’Riordan (2013) Sistematizacion de experiencias sobre mitigacion y adaptacion al cambio climatico en once ciudades de Colombia – Analisis transversal, IRG, Bogota.

Taylor, A., A. Cartwright and C. Sutherland (2014), Institutional Pathways for Local Climate Adaptation: A Comparison of Three South African Municipalities, Focales, n°18, AFD, Paris.

Incorporate adaptation into a long-term integrated urban development approach, as in the Green and Sustainable Urban Planning (GSUP) project, for which AFD helped to implement local plans for adaptation and risk prevention in three cities in the Philippines; Improve coordination among the levels, actors and planning documents dealing with adaptation; Develop participative approaches and more generally consultation.

A QUESTION OF DEVELOPMENT is an AFD Research Department publication which presents syntheses of studies and research initiated or supported by AFD. This series aims to summarize the questioning, the approach, the lessons and the prospects of the study presented. Thus, it intends to open new avenues for action and thinking. The analyses and conclusions of this document are formulated under the responsibility of its author(s). They do not necessarily reflec t the point of view of AFD or its partner institutions • Publication director: Anne PAUGAM • Editorial director: Alain HENRY • Agence Française de Développement: 5, rue Roland Barthes - 75598 Paris Cedex 12 • Copyright: November 2014 • ISSN: 2271-7404 • Conception: • Layout: Ferrari / Elm