This platform attempts to support the decision-making process for climate adaptation options. As data is scarce in some situations, the methodology behind this platform is flexible and two assessments can be conducted: preliminary and detailed. The first will provide you a rank of climate adaptation measures for a specific strategy. In case of enough information is available a detailed assessment may follow a process to analyse the effectiveness of adaptation scenarios (i.e. a set of measures acting jointly) according to user-defined prioritisation criteria. Graphs are provided at the end of the process to summarise the results. For further information regarding the prioritization methodology see Guerrero-Hidalga et al. (2020).
Guerrero-Hidalga, M., Martínez-Gomariz, E., Evans, B., Webber, J., Termes-Rifé, M., Russo, B., Locatelli, L., 2020. Methodology to Prioritize Climate Adaptation Measures in Urban Areas. Barcelona and Bristol Case Studies. Sustain. 2020, Vol. 12, Page 4807 12, 4807. https://doi.org/10.3390/SU12124807
The main user of this platform is expected to be a decision-maker at the municipal level. However, all those involved in the tasks of climate adaptation actions are more than welcome to register and assess the most beneficial strategies for their cities.
No, you do not. A database of more than 100 climate adaptation measures is publicly available. These measures were created based on the experience of three European cities: Barcelona, Lisbon, and Bristol.
Only if you want to create specific strategies for your city and prioritise them according to your particular criteria.
Yes, when you create a new strategy you can either select available measures from the database, or create new measures if none of the existing suit your strategy. They will remain private if you don't want to publish them. This means that new measures will not be added to the public database automatically, although you can opt-in and we will review and publish them.
Yes, a sample strategy is available in the strategy section in order to help users with a step-by-step guide to create a specific strategy for their urban areas. It comes from the results obtained in the RESCCUE Project, and offers costs and effectiveness estimates calculated within the project, as well as risks reduction, expected damages and ecosystem services provision for a stormwater flooding impacts reduction strategy in a 1.5 million inhabitants city.
The purpose of this strategy is to facilitate the users to understand the methodological process behind it, and also to have a reference of magnitudes in the case their urban areas do not have any specific adaptation study. However, the ideal is to obtain tailored figures that accounts for the particularities of the area and its society, as costs, benefits and the different impacts are dependent on many different factors and cannot be directly transferred from one site to another. Please refer to state-of the art publications or EU-level studies such as the ones available in the EU Adaptation Strategy website.
The evidence suggests that citizens are more likely to take action on climate change, or more likely to support governments that take action on climate change, if the wider co-benefits of those actions are emphasised (Bain et al. 2015). Additionally, attention should be paid to the socio-economic transformations in the context of climate change adaptation, needed for rooted and effective long term impacts. In this sense, it is important to address them when evaluating and presenting the policy options.
To do so, the RESCCUE team used the methodology proposed by the C40 and the London School of Economics (LSE), "Co-benefits of urban climate action: A framework for cities" (Floater, G., et al., 2016), available in this link: lsecities.net/co-benefits. The co-benefits classification found in this website, it is also based on their findings. In a first round of workshops, there was a selection of indicators from the co-benefits standardization framework in the C40 reference publication. From their extensive framework, a multidisciplinary group of experts selected indicators relevant to resilience and urban services. They were classified by economic, social, and environmental co-benefits (as in the measures details while creating an strategy).
In a second workshop, the experts working group was asked to score every measure under the selected indicators using a 0 to 10 scoring system. There was a discussion and voting exercise for each indicator and measure, and consensus was found through a session facilitator. Average values were estimated for each category of co-benefit, in order to include average values per category for each measure in the ranking exercise.
To the users of this platform, we recommend to follow the approach of the second stage, which consists in gathering a multidisciplinary experts group that is able to give an informed evaluation about the main economic, social and environmental co-benefits provided by each measure in the form of a score (1-10).
The results of the RESCCUE exercise are shown as a sample, to provide support to those users that are not able to carry out the recommended workshop. However, as every city has a different context, the scores are expected to differ from site to site.