Local sustainable development: a knowledge base for adaptation planning

ABSTRACT

Towards the end of the century, Serbia will face a dramatic increase in annual temperature between 2°C and 6°C and decrease in annual accumulated precipitation up to 12%. Recent 2014 floods in Serbia, with more than 30 victims, and more than 30,000 displaced people, with overall damage close to €1.5 billion, reflected those trends and the likely risks that region will face due the changing climate. Those risks may influence the development process at the local level. This paper assesses the existing priority measures in local sustainable development strategies and re-interprets their characteristics using a methodological framework for the definition of adaptation measures. It offers a new understanding of the ongoing local sustainable development approach in the potentially most vulnerable municipalities in Serbia. The study focused on following properties of developmental measures: cost-effectiveness, structural characteristics, target realm, spatial determination, time frame, climate responsiveness, and sector and budget allocation of development measures at the local level. The results of the analysis suggest that the initiation of adaptation planning should consider the improvement of the methodological framework – the introduction of inter-sectoral and cross-sectoral planning practice, cost–benefit analysis, the involvement of individual actors in planning and dynamic planning approaches.

KEYWORDS:

• Climate change
• local sustainable development
• Serbia
• adaptation

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge the ORIENTGATE project (co-funded by the South East Europe Transnational Cooperation Program) for providing and sharing data on CC scenarios (http://www.orientgateproject.org). We would like also to thank with sincere appreciation the assistance of the anonymous referee for their very valuable comments which greatly enhanced the value of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Petar Vranić http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9671-992X

Notes

1 Off. Gazette RS, No. 88/10.

2 Off. Gazette, no. 55/05, 71/05-correction and 101/07.

3 Off. Gazette of RS, No. 33 of 15 April 2012.

4 Off. Gazette of RS, no. 135/2004, 36/2009, 36/2009, Law, 72 / 2009 - law, 43/2011 - decision and 14/2016.

5 Off. Gazette of RS 8/10.

Additional information

Funding

This work is supported by Serbian Ministry of Education and Science through Mathematical Institute of Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Project III44006 and III42006).