Report
Developing Robust Strategies for Climate Change and Other Risks
Jan 28, 2015
This report presents a decisionmaking framework and supporting indicators to guide urban responses to climate change based on principles of risk governance, along with considerations of institutional arrangements and their economic and social context. The framework emphasizes identification of indicators of capacities and processes to implement, adapt, and transform policies, institutions, financing, and other actions to affect change.
Framework for Decisionmaking and Supporting Indicators
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Developing indicators for successful urban responses to climate change has proven particularly challenging. Climate change is intertwined with a wide range of activities in urban areas. Today's actions may have important longer-term consequences, and significant uncertainty clouds our understanding of both the scale of future impacts and the effectiveness of many responses. Successful strategies will likely include both "low-hanging fruit" and fundamental, transformative change. This study proposes a decisionmaking framework and supporting indicators for urban responses to climate change based on risk governance — an extension of the established practices of risk assessment and management that include considerations of institutions and their economic and social context. Urban areas commonly contend with multiple and overlapping jurisdictions, conflicting social objectives, and deep uncertainty about the future. For these reasons, risk governance is well-suited for characterizing how urban areas make investment and policy decisions of major consequence. The proposed indicators are divided into two categories: those relating to the current and future state of the urban region and those related to the quality of the plan and the process that produced it. The authors identified existing systems of indicators, organized them in their framework, and developed an example of what these indicators might look like in actual practice. The framework also distinguishes among three categories of actions, called tiers of transformation. These tiers reflect an increasing challenge for implementation but also an increasing benefit of transformational change.
Chapter One
Introduction
Chapter Two
Risk Governance Framework for Decisionmaking
Chapter Three
Indicators to Support Climate Risk Governance and Decisionmaking
Chapter Four
Discussion
Appendix A
Literature Review of Key Terms
Appendix B
Survey of Frameworks for Urban Responses to Climate Change
Appendix C
Overview of Existing Climate Adaptation Indicator Systems
Appendix D
Overview of Responses to Climate Change in Urban Areas of the United States
The research described in this report was conducted in the Infrastructure Resilience and Environmental Policy within RAND Justice, Infrastructure, and Environment.
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