Informing UK governance of resilience to climate risks: improving the local evidence-base

International assessments of evidence on climate change (e.g. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC) or national climate change risk assessments (e.g. UK Climate Change Risk Assessment, CCRA) do not offer a sufficiently granular perspective on climate impacts to adequately inform governance of resilience to climate risks at the local level. Using an analysis of UK decision-makers managing and responding to heatwaves and flood risks, this paper argues how more robust local evidence is needed to inform decision-making regarding adaptation options for enhancing local resilience. We identify evidence gaps and issues relating to local climate change impacts, including sources and quality of evidence used, adequacy and accessibility of evidence available, ill-communicated evidence and conflicting or misused evidence. A lack of appreciation regarding how scientific evidence and personal judgement can mutually enhance the quality of decision-making underpins all of these gaps. Additionally, we find that the majority of evidence currently used is reductively based upon socio-economic and physical characteristics of climate risks. We argue that a step change is needed in local climate resilience that moves beyond current physical and socio-economic risk characterisation to a more inclusive co-constitution of social and politically defined climate risks at the local scale that are better aligned with the local impacts felt and needs of stakeholders

Fostering the Citizen Participation Models for Public Value Creation in Cooperative Environment of Smart Cities

Part 3: Smart Governance (Government, Cities and Regions)International audienceThe growth of smart cities is forcing governments to focus their efforts on the increase of public value creation. Based on prior research, on the perception of smart city practitioners and on an empirical observation, this paper seeks to analyse the public value creation under the context of the smart cities, examining the model of citizen participation and the use of new technologies by city governments in smart cities with the aim at improving e-participation of the citizenry in the public arena. Findings indicate the need for using new technologies to adopt a more participative model of governance, although, nowadays, sample smart cities are not putting available technological tools or promoting citizens to be involved in online public consultations, discussions and petitions

Climate governance and high-end futures in Europe

In this chapter, we present how climate action that fosters transformations to sustainability and resilience in European societies can be developed in the context of high-end climate change. The chapter builds from the IMPRESSIONS inter- and transdisciplinary research project work on high-end climate change. It brings a unique perspective on long-term horizons (until 2100) and extreme climate change and socio-economic scenarios and uncertainties, as well as how to co-develop transformative adaptation and mitigation pathways with stakeholders to build capacities for responding to such scenarios. The chapter responds to the very fundamental question: ‘what is high-end climate change and why it is relevant for science and policy?

Agency Capacities to Implement Transition Pathways Under High-End Scenarios

This chapter introduces the robust transition pathways developed in four case studies at different scales in Europe and analyses what capacities they create. Implementing transition pathways to respond to high-end scenarios and contribute to sustainability and resilience transformations requires new agency capacities that are able to deal with complexity, uncertainty, thresholds and lock-ins. We identified key conditions that may enable an overall shift towards an integrated, multi-scale, inclusive and learning-based governance approach. The capacities are enacted by a large diversity of actors—combining a mix of governance models and instruments, including decisive top-down regulation, market-based self-regulation and sustainability accounting, and bottom-up and community-based decision-making, markets and resource management. The agency capacities show ways forward for supporting systemic solutions and innovations with multiple benefits, and how to build social resilience and adaptive institutions