Urban climate change adaptation planning using participatory scenarios: a systematic review of methods and approaches

Abstract

Planning for urban climate change adaptation often employs public participatory approaches and utilizes scenarios to explore possible climate change futures. The recent proliferation of studies in this field highlights the need for an assessment of research practice and knowledge gaps. We present the results of a systematic literature review of participatory scenario approaches used in urban climate change adaptation research. We classified public participation into three types according to level of participation with scenarios and found that over one third of studies lacked significant public participation in scenario development. Our results demonstrate a focus on a limited range of climate change effects and world regions, particularly Europe and North America. Many publications also provided an incomplete description of methods and almost half did not report on any possible study impacts. We conclude with recommendations that may increase the effectiveness of work on urban community climate change adaptation through participatory scenario processes.

Keywords:

• climate change adaptation
• community
• public participation
• scenario
• urban

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the data extraction work provided by Jacob Wright.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by a University of Waterloo Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council seed grant.