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Abstract
Urban centres play a crucial role in managing global carbon emissions (mitigation) and reducing vulnerability to climate change (adaptation). This paper describes some of the mitigation and adaptation entry points and challenges for city-relevant planning and policy-making posed by the processes defining urban greenhouse gas emissions, vulnerabilities and adaptive capacities. It finds that although many cities are already responding to the climate challenge, existing initiatives are fragmented and a piecemeal rather than a strategic approach is very common. Frequently mitigation and adaptation responses do not address many of the key drivers and determinants involved (e.g. consumption patterns and equity issues determining differentiated access to the determinants of adaptive capacity), nor do they fit with the issues they are intended to address. This is so because climate responses and the issues they are intended to address are multi-scale in nature because most of the processes involved operate at multiple sectoral, temporal and spatial levels. In the face of the complexity of the interconnected processes involved in the relationships between cities and climate change, it is not surprising that local authorities tend to move towards rhetoric rather than meaningful responses.
Acknowledgments
This work is supported by the National Science foundation (NSF) HPCC, 9139, 7785, 7726. Any opinions, findings and conclusions, recommendations or omissions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of NSF. I want to thank Daniel Gnatz and the reviewers for their valuable suggestions and input to this paper.
Notes
A commissioned Background Paper and three chapters of the 2011 UN-Habitat Report on Cities and Climate Change (Romero Lankao, Citation2008, 2011; Romero Lankao & Gnatz, Citation2011; Romero Lankao et al., 2011) as well as a 2011 special issue of Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability on “Cities in transition: Transforming urban centers from hotbeds of GHG emissions and vulnerability to seedbeds of sustainability and resilience”.
According to Turner et al., (2003) hazards are “…threats to a system, comprised of perturbations and stress (and stressors), and the consequences they produce”.
E.g. London, UK, Boston, New York, Los Angeles, USA, Hamilton and Wellington; Durban and Cape Town, South Africa, Esmeraldas, Ecuador; Kampala, Uganda; Beijing, China; Maputo, Mozambique; Mexico City and Sorsogon City, the Philippines (see Anguelovsky & Carmin, Citation2011; Carter, Citation2011; Hardoy & Romero Lankao, Citation2011; Hunt & Watkiss, Citation2007; Liu and Deng, Citation2011; Roberts, Citation2008; Satterthwaite et al., 2007; UN-Habitat, 2009; Zimmerman & Faris, Citation2011).
Although coping and adaptation refer to actual responses that depend on many determinants of adaptive capacity, they differ in some respects. While adaptation has a long-term perspective, coping mechanisms have a short-term perspective and can increase vulnerability or undermine sustainable adaptation strategies over the long term. Coping includes temporal changes to behaviour or employment of techniques that allow urban actors to deal with immediate hazard events, but then return to their original practices after the pressing danger has passed (Gallopin, Citation2006).
Project 2° is a collaboration between the Clinton Climate Initiative, Microsoft Corporation, Autodesk and ICLEI, which “allows cities to establish a baseline on their greenhouse gas emissions, manage inventories, create action plans, track the effectiveness of their emissions reduction programs, and share experiences with each other”. http://www.project2degrees.org/Pages/Default.aspx Viewed on 07/30/2010