Trade-offs and synergies in urban climate policies

International audienceCities are at the forefront of climate policies(1-6). However, urban climate policies are not implemented in a vacuum; they interact with other policy goals, such as economic competitiveness or social issues. These interactions can lead to trade-offs and implementation obstacles, or to synergies(7,8). Little analysis investigating these interactions exists, in part because it requires a broad interdisciplinary approach. Using a new integrated city model, we provide a first quantification of these trade-offs and synergies, going beyond the qualitative statements that have been published so far. We undertake a multicriteria analysis of three urban policies: a greenbelt policy, a zoning policy to reduce flood risk and a transportation subsidy. Separately, each of these policies seems to be undesirable because each one negatively affects at least one of the different policy goals; however, in a policy mix, the consequences of each policy are not simply additive. This nonlinearity permits building policy combinations that are win-win strategies. In particular, flood zoning and greenbelt policies can only be accepted if combined with transportation policies. Our results show that stand-alone adaptation and mitigation policies are unlikely to be politically acceptable and emphasize the need to mainstream climate policy within urban planning

Assessing local climate vulnerability and winegrowers’ adaptive processes in the context of climate change.

International audienc

Diagnosing institutional barriers and opportunities for adaptation to climate change

Institutions are one of the decisive factors which enable, constrain and shape adaptation to the impacts of climate change, variability and extreme events. However, current understanding of institutions in adaptation situations is fragmented across the scientific community, evidence diverges, and cumulative learning beyond single studies is limited. This study adopts a diagnostic approach to elaborate a nuanced understanding of institutional barriers and opportunities in climate adaptation by means of a model-centred meta-analysis of 52 case studies of public climate adaptation in Europe. The first result is a novel taxonomy of institutional attributes in adaptation situations. It conceptually organises and decomposes the many details of institutions that empirical research has shown to shape climate adaptation. In the second step, the paper identifies archetypical patterns of institutional traps and trade-offs which hamper adaptation. Thirdly, corresponding opportunities are identified that enable actors to alleviate, prevent or overcome specific institutional traps or trade-offs. These results cast doubt on the validity of general institutional design principles for successful adaptation. In contrast to generic principles, the identified opportunities provide leverage to match institutions to specific governance problems that are encountered in specific contexts. Taken together, the results may contribute to more coherence and integration of adaptation research that we need if we are to foster learning about the role of institutions in adaptation situations in a cumulative fashion