scholarly journals DRAFT Climate Change Adaptation Indicators Framework for the City of Boston, MA

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
SeaPlan

Despite global efforts to mitigate climate change, climate change impacts are occurring, and will likely increase in severity in the coming decades. The City of Boston has stated its commitment to mitigating climate change and preparing the city for its impacts through the establishment of the Climate Action Plan (2010). Through their report, the Climate Action Leadership Committee and the Community Advisory Committee of the City of Boston established the need for an indicators framework to track the progress of the City of Boston in preparing for climate change. “A Draft Climate Adaptation Indicators Framework for the City of Boston, MA” provides a pragmatic approach to establishing indicator metrics to better understand the City of Boston’s vulnerabilities and to evaluate and track its progress in implementing preparedness and resilience measures. This report describes the four-step methodology to develop a climate change adaptation (CCA) indicators framework, the resulting draft CCA indicators framework, and recommendations for next steps in implementing and honing this framework.

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 777-785 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark M. Shimamoto ◽  
Sabrina McCormick

Abstract Climate change threatens the health of urban residents in many ways. This qualitative study aims to understand how six U.S. cities are considering health adaptation when responding to climate change; 65 semistructured interviews were conducted with salient stakeholders across six U.S. cities (Boston, Massachusetts; Los Angeles, California; Portland, Oregon; Raleigh, North Carolina; Tampa, Florida; and Tucson, Arizona), and transcripts were analyzed to identify common themes. Each city’s (or county’s) most recent climate action plan was also analyzed. This study found that interviewees’ ability to understand the connection between climate and health was a major determinant for health adaptation implementation. In addition, institutional fragmentation in governance made it difficult to incorporate health concerns into broader climate planning. However, cross-sectoral collaborations and considerations of health cobenefits were shown to help overcome these barriers. These findings offer valuable insight regarding how policy makers and practitioners can safeguard public health from the effects of climate change.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (26) ◽  
pp. 103-117
Author(s):  
Gianni Lobosco ◽  
Vittoria Mencarini

The contribution presents the results of a research project carried out within the main framework of the “Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan” for the Ravenna Municipality, one of the signatories of the “Covenant of Mayors for Climate and Energy”. The project goal is to provide decision makers and city planners with landscape-oriented strategies capable of improving the territorial resilience vis-a-vis climate change impacts in the next decades. The research focuses on the construction of future alternative scenarios on a 2100 horizon. From their comparison, a short-term vision (2050) open to alternative developments has been designed. The study provides an overall view, on a municipal scale, of the main adaptation actions that can be implemented; then, it tests their potential effectiveness on smaller case-studies illustrating some recurring landscape units of the territory.


Author(s):  
Leonardo Zea-Reyes ◽  
Veronica Olivotto ◽  
Sylvia I. Bergh

AbstractCities around the world are confronted with the need to put in place climate adaptation policies to protect citizens and properties from climate change impacts. This article applies components of the framework developed by Moser and Ekström (2010) onto empirical qualitative data to diagnose institutional barriers to climate change adaptation in the Municipality of Beirut, Lebanon. Our approach reveals the presence of two vicious cycles influencing each other. In the first cycle, the root cause barrier is major political interference generating competing priorities and poor individual interest in climate change. A second vicious cycle is derived from feedbacks caused by the first and leading to the absence of a dedicated department where sector specific climate risk information is gathered and shared with other departments, limited knowledge and scientific understanding, as well as a distorted framing or vision, where climate change is considered unrelated to other issues and is to be dealt with at higher levels of government. The article also highlights the need to analyze interlinkages between barriers in order to suggest how to overcome them. The most common way to overcome barriers according to interviewees is through national and international support followed by the creation of a data bank. These opportunities could be explored by national and international policy-makers to break the deadlock in Beirut.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 100-111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Anna R. Davies ◽  
Stephan Hügel

The visibility of young people in climate change debates has risen significantly since the inception of the Fridays for Future movement, but little is known about the diversity of positions, perspectives and experiences of young people in Ireland, especially with respect to climate change adaptation planning. To close this knowledge gap, this article first interrogates key emergent spaces of public participation within the arena of climate action in Ireland in order to identify the extent of young people’s participation and whether any specific consideration is given to disadvantaged groups. It then tests the impacts of workshops specifically designed to support disadvantaged young people’s engagement with climate change adaptation which were rolled out with a designated Delivering Equality of Opportunity in Schools school in inner-city Dublin, Ireland. We found limited attention to public participation in climate change adaptation planning generally, with even less consideration given to engaging young people from disadvantaged communities. However, positive impacts with respect to enhanced knowledge of climate change science and policy processes emerged following participation in the workshops, providing the bedrock for a greater sense of self-efficacy around future engagement with climate action amongst the young people involved. We conclude that what is needed to help ensure procedural justice around climate action in Ireland are specific, relevant and interactive educational interventions on the issue of climate change adaptation; interventions which are sensitive to matters of place and difference.


The development, implementation and monitoring of the Sustainable Energy and Climate Action Plan require a significant amount of data and analysis, as well as an effective and comprehensive decision making process. This chapter presents the pilot application of the proposed “MPC+ (Map - Plan - Choose - Check)” framework, through the “Action3” Decision Support System, in a Greek energy-producing community. The pilot application is conducted in three phases, namely the development of the baseline emission inventory (Phase I), the creation and evaluation of alternative Scenarios of Actions (Phase II) and the monitoring of the actions and measures implemented (Phase III). The city's univocal economy orientation of energy production through lignite is considered as a basic, inhibitory factor towards sustainability. In this respect, the city has committed to implement a series of appropriate renewable energy and rational use of energy activities in its territory, laying balanced emphasis on the local energy and heat production, and the promotion and implementation of measures on energy savings. A significant part of the CO2 emissions' reduction will come from the installation of biomass district heating systems in local communities.


2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 316-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tiara R. Na’puti ◽  
Phaedra C. Pezzullo ◽  
Leah Sprain ◽  
Lydia Reinig

Abstract Energy democracy hopes to foster community engagement and participation in shaping our transition from fossil fuels to a renewable energy-based economy. These considerations result from critiques by environmental justice, climate justice, and just transition advocates. Although many are sympathetic to energy democracy ideals, climate goals often are articulated in math terms. This essay defines the aforementioned key terms and asks: what are the limitations and possibilities of engaging publics when climate action solely is articulated in numbers? A compelling case study is the City of Boulder – recognized as a global leader in climate science and a national leader in innovative environmental planning. This essay shares work from 2016, when the City shared a climate action plan for public feedback, supported several public participation events, and passed climate action legislation goals. We argue a just transition and energy democracy ideals are hindered if we reduce climate goals to math.


Proceedings ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Finger ◽  
Stepanovic ◽  
Llano

Anaerobic digestion of urban organic wastes, farming slurries or sewage sludge is a common practice in waste treatment plants. In the city of Reykjavik, the organic waste fraction constituted by 60% of biomass and 40% of food waste will be transformed by the local waste company SORPA providing biofuel for up to 10% of the cars. Such measures belong to the 2018-2030 Climate Action Plan from the Icelandic Government.


Author(s):  
Denise Regina da Costa Aguiar ◽  
Paulo Eduardo Alves Camargo-Cruz ◽  
Flávia Grecco Resende

This article sought to analyze the Climate Action Plan for the City of São Paulo 2020-2050 (PlanClima SP), published in June 2021, in dialogue with the documents: Curriculum of the City of Natural Sciences and 2030 Agenda. In a critical perspective of Environmental Education, the PlanClima SP establishes some actions towards zero carbon in 2050. In this sense, the objective of the study was to analyze the potentialities presented in the document for the development of sustainable pedagogical practices. The methodology selected for this study was qualitative, carried out with the analysis of the cited documents based on the concept of the Critical Environmental Education. The results found demonstrate practical possibilities for actions aimed at training critical and reflective students for a sustainable development. The Environmental Education actions proposed in the analyzed material point to the modification and construction of behaviors and attitudes aimed at the culture of environmental preservation. It is concluded that the discussion about carbon emissions in a critical and conscious way, through pedagogical practices, is powerful in environmental preservation and sustainability.


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