Risk and vulnerability analysis: A feasible process for local climate adaptation in Sweden?

Abstract

Climate change is an important new challenge for local authorities. This study analyses the potential for using the Swedish mandatory process for risk and vulnerability analysis (RVA) as a vehicle to improve local climate adaptation work. An advantage with RVA is its comprehensive approach in dealing with all relevant threats and all vital functions of society. In order to test the applicability of incorporating climate adaptation into RVA, we studied practical experiences from three Swedish municipalities. In all municipalities, a pre-study to identify relevant climate-induced events was performed. In one municipality, this was followed by a more detailed analysis of the potential impacts of these events on the functions of the various administrations and companies within the local authority. Problems identified in successful integration of climate change into the municipal RVA process were lack of sufficient knowledge to identify the impacts of climate change on the level of the respective specialist or district administration and lack of resources to perform the analysis. There were also some difficulties in including a long-term perspective relevant for climate adaptation into RVA, which usually focuses on current threats. A positive outcome was that work on extreme climate events in RVA provided a traceable method to identify events with a potentially great impact on the function of local society and results that could be fed into other ongoing processes, such as spatial planning and housing plans.

Keywords:

• climate adaptation
• risk and vulnerability analysis
• Swedish municipalities
• policy integration

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency and Skåne Regional Council, valuable discussions with Per Sundström and personnel at Stockholm, Landskrona and Staffanstorp municipalities.

Notes

In this paper, we use the term “municipality” for a geographical area and “local authority” for the organisation that governs this area. In Sweden, there is no formal difference in responsibilities between large cities and small rural municipalities. However, as Swedish municipalities vary both in population (ranging between 2500 and 800,000 inhabitants), and resources, their organisational structure and the way they work with risk and vulnerability issues may vary significantly.

Extraordinary events are defined as “events that divert from the normal situation, lead to serious disturbances or imminent risk of serious disturbances in important societal functions and which demand prompt actions”.

In the following, we use the term “climate-induced events” to describe events caused by extreme weather or combinations of weather events that pose extreme impacts on society. An climate-induced event may be caused by a weather extreme, e.g. extreme precipitation may cause flooding, or it may be caused by gradual climate change, e.g. a small increase in winter temperature may lead to increasing freeze–thaw events that trigger rockslides (Groven et al. 2012; see also IPCC 2012).

This step corresponds to the systematic identification of unwanted events that according to MSB should be methodologically included in the analysis, as described earlier.

The future climate was based on result from the climate model RCA3, Rossby Centre, SMHI, emission scenarios SRES A2 and SRES B2. The handbook made clear that these were only two of many possible outcomes, and that there is uncertainty in the outcome due, among other things, to uncertainties in future emissions and simplifications in the models. It was pointed out, the trends (e.g. higher temperatures, more intensive rain) were more important than the absolute levels.

The future climate was based on results from the climate model RCA3, Rossby Centre, SMHI, emission scenarios SRES A2 and SRES B2.

This was assumed to illustrate a similar deviation from the average summer temperature in Stockholm in 2030 as the deviation from the normal 2003 temperature in Paris during its much discussed heat wave in that year.

Consisting of a summary of media coverage of weather events and their consequences during 5 years and subsequent interviews, primarily with key individuals within the municipality. See UKCIP (2012) for the original tool and Climatools (2012) for the tool adapted to a Swedish context.