Enhancing the resilience of midsize cities to climate extremes:A tool for practitioners to assess their governance context

With increasing awareness and impacts of climate change, many cities strive for resilience to absorb and recover from shocks and disruptions from climate extremes. Working towards making a city climate resilient implies the design and adjustment of strategies, which often involve water-related projects and require cross-sectoral collaboration. Various tools and approaches exist to support cities in assessing and improving their climate resilience. However, they often address the characteristics of large cities, and few of them consider how the governance context, including social, institutional and political circumstances, affects the implementation of strategies and projects. Tailor-made tools are needed for midsize cities to address their specific characteristics and assess their governance context. This paper presents such a governance assessment tool for practitioners in midsize cities. Building on an existing governance assessment tool, we co-designed and applied a practitioners’ tool in collaboration with seven mid-size cities in the North Sea Region. The tool guides the practitioners in midsize cities to assess how the governance context affects the realization of strategies and projects towards urban climate resilience. Experience of the practitioners that applied the tool indicate that it is easy to use and provides insights into supportive and restrictive aspects of governance, with room for improvement regarding formulation of the assessment questions and answers. While the tool is relevant for other policy fields, its application would require re-tailoring the questions and answers to the specific context of those fields

Using energy justice as a search light for gender and energy policy research:A systematic review

This paper develops and tests a policy framework for gender and energy justice through building on the key concepts in gender and energy policy literature. Based on the historical development of the gender and energy policy nexus, three major discourses are discerned: empowerment, gender mainstreaming and gender transformation. All these discourses identify engendering a policy as process, and have a common goal, which is to develop a policy that acknowledges the gendered difference of needs and interests. Two gender-analytical frameworks are instrumental to understand the gender-energy nexus from an energy systems approach; the needs-based approach and the rights-based approach. Both approaches address social justice in energy policy, by creating awareness on the different energy needs of men and women and the rights that entitle them to equal access to energy services. The search for a just energy policy is central in the energy justice discourse. Energy justice is used as a concept, an analytical tool and a decision-making framework, based on three principles: distributional, recognition and procedural justice. Through juxtaposing the gender analytical frameworks of energy policy and the energy justice principles, a gender and energy just policy framework has been developed. This framework identifies the three engendering processes on one axis of the matrix and the three principles of energy justice on the other. This paper is the first attempt to test this framework by applying it in a systematic review of the scholarly literature on gender and energy justice. The concepts of the framework are recognized in the existing scholarly literature. However, the applicability of the framework as an analytical tool needs further analysis and evidence-based testing to be developed as a decision-making instrument for policy design

For better or worse:the influence of conflict-driven decentralization on the resilience of urban water supply infrastructure in the Middle East

When armed conflicts disrupt urban water supply, local communities are forced to find other ways to fulfill their domestic water needs. In this paper, we analyze the development of decentralized water infrastructure as a coping strategy during armed conflict in five cities across Iraq, Syria and Yemen. We discuss the implications of conflict-driven decentralization on the resilience of urban water supply infrastructure, addressing its functionality, its recovery in case of disruption, and its sustainability on the long term. The results indicate that decentralized water supply systems developed throughout conflict uphold a basic level of functionality and minimize their vulnerability to conflict-related shocks. However, short-term resilience gains come at the cost of health risks and high water prices, and undermine system sustainability due to a lack of coordination. We conclude that decentralization processes implemented within the constraints of armed conflict are often detrimental to infrastructure resilience, particularly over longer timeframes.</p

Effect of land-use/land-cover change on the future of rainfed agriculture in the Jenin Governorate, Palestine

An article in International Journal of Global Environmental, Vol. 16, Nos. 1/2/3, 2017Land cover has been changed by humans throughout history. At the global level, population growth and socio-economic development have a significant impact on land resources. Recently, scholars added climate change as one of the major factors affecting land-cover transformation. In the West Bank of Palestine, the situation is more complicated, where geopolitical constraints due to the Israeli occupation and lack of control over land resources. In the West Bank, fertile land represents 16%, 87% of the cultivated land is rainfed, 11% is pastureland and 2% is irrigated. This paper focuses on the problems of agricultural land shrinkage by time and tries to reveal the major factors behind this change. The study area is Jenin, a major agricultural area in the West Bank, Palestine. Statistical data, aerial photos and related attribute data were analyzed by using GIS software. The study showed that urban growth is the major threat on agricultural lands