ADAPTATION STRATEGIES: A MUST FOR RESILIENT CITIES

Mitigation and adaptation are two different concepts and often mistakenly employed. Whilst the first, within the framework of climate change, is mainly focussed on reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, the second one, in case of cities, mean the establishment of strategies to decrease the vulnerability and increase the resilience facing those not desirable effects.

On the other hand, some confusion exists sometimes between adaptation measures and strategies. Adaptation measures are specific interventions to address a concrete climate risk. These measures can, for example, prevent a hazardous event from happening, reduce or deflect the impact of a hazardous event or improve recovery after a hazardous event. There are different type of measures: technical, infrastructural, economic or social. Thus, an adaptation measure could be building a dam, increasing the price of drinking water or raising awareness of flood risks.

For their part, adaptation strategies are a collection of measures linked to specific risks and their impacts. An adaptation strategy provides a framework for the implementation of specific measures defined in that strategy. It could be stated that an adaptation strategy consists mainly in the following aspects: the identification of the risks and their impacts, strategic goals that need to be achieved, measures that help achieving those goals, and an implementation plan for each measure involved. Within the RESCCUE project an increase of resilience is being treated in a holistic manner, therefore, the adaptation strategies should be assessed in a multisectorial approach. For this reason, having the inputs of various RESCCUE partners representing different urban sectors allows to select of the most adequate adaptation strategies for each case.

In the framework of RESCCUE, Cetaqua, Water Technology Centre, brought its knowledge and expertise to lead the development of an adaptation strategies database based on the already-known needs of the three RESCCUE research sites: Barcelona, Lisbon and Bristol. Additionally, during the next years of the project more strategies will be created within the above-mentioned database after identifying more needs according to the risks assessment for future scenarios. A multi-criteria analysis based on the co-benefits, the investment estimation and the services interdependence effects will allow to prioritize the adaptation strategies selection for each city.

Co-benefits are additional benefits that are not necessarily ‘climate related’ but their importance could be enormously important when implementing a specific adaptation strategy. According to the IPCC, “Co-benefits are the benefits from policy options implemented for various reasons at the same time”, and the C40 Cities Climate Leadership group states that “co-benefits often have more local and more immediate impacts and realisation which is to cities’ advantage”. For these reasons, the importance of the co-benefits is highlighted within the RESCCUE project, and they have been related to each adaptation strategy.

The complexity of the interrelation among urban services lead us to consider aspects such as cascade failure effects, which is comprehensively treated thanks to Hazur®, a software-based solution used in the framework of RESCCUE. As one of the existing approaches to assess urban resilience, Hazur® is a platform and methodology to analyse the response of a city when a certain impact occurs, such as floods, droughts, Combined Sewer Overflows (CSOs) or heat waves, and these affect urban services, taking into account even the cascading failures. In this sense, the initial resilience state for each research site will be established thanks to the resilience assessment in each city by means of Hazur®. The proper application of adaptation strategies should increase the city resilience, thus, a post-strategies resilience state will also be assessed through Hazur® and these results will be another criterion to prioritize the strategies to be implemented. All this will allow our cities to improve their decisions and reduce risks related to climate change.