What does successful urban adaptation look like?

This article is written by Maria Loroño Leturiondo, Postdoctoral Researcher, IMAGINE Adaptation; William Lewis, Project Manager, IMAGINE Adaptation; and Marta Olazabal, Principal Investigator, IMAGINE Adaptation, all based at the Basque Centre for Climate Change, BC3.

• The problem: Adaptation progress is poorly understood and tracked.
• Why it matters: Only by understanding what good adaptation looks like, can we think of how to evaluate it.
• The solution: Using images, we will investigate the views of experts and professionals working on urban adaptation to create a broader understanding of adaptation success.

Cities worldwide are looking to adapt to climate change and are often faced with the following question: how can we tell whether adaptation interventions are effective and actually working to reduce climate vulnerabilities and increase resilience?

The process of adaptation is, by definition, never fully finished and is always changing based on current and expected climate change. The IPCC defines adaptation as “the process of adjustment to actual or expected climate and its effects”. This definition, as such, does not involve any discussion on how adaptation should happen or at the expense of what. All too often, there are different perspectives of what adaptation to climate change might look like and what we actually need to adapt to, not just within cities but often also within a single local community. Especially because of the overlapping challenges regarding sustainability, social justice and biodiversity.

By establishing a definition of adaptation success that goes beyond technical framings, we can consider equity, justice and maladaptive issues.

For example, efforts to increase the amount of green space in an urban area may increase property or rental prices which in turn leads to the displacement of long-standing community members who have lived there all their lives. For this reason, who gets to define what is success in adaptation and what should be measured to understand it are important questions to consider before defining any goals or metrics.

What is adaptation?

By establishing a definition of adaptation success that goes beyond technical framings, we can consider equity, justice and maladaptive issues. Such a definition can act as a baseline for proposed goals and metrics for adaptation and crucially, help avoid a potential lock-in of urban risks to create transformative urban adaptation. So, how can we establish a definition that actually works for everyone? Is this even possible in practice?

The project IMAGINE Adaptation is looking at how different adaptation experts in 100 cities worldwide imagine their city adapted. A critical review of relevant academic and non-academic literature has resulted in the identification of 31 concepts linked to urban adaptation. By asking experts across the cities to rank them based on how much (or little) they represent their views of an adapted city, different viewpoints can be grouped to build a better and more diverse picture of success in urban adaptation that is closer to grounded realities.

Images are a suitable prompt to think about and imagine the future. Literature on visual cognition suggests that in order to process information, humans create mental images of verbal information. Therefore, with text-only information, readers need to generate a mental image in order to be able to process it, which makes information processing and understanding more taxing. Thinking about what cities would look like in the future is a very visual exercise that could be aided if different understandings of urban adaptation were presented through images. Furthermore, images are not language specific, and do not therefore exclude anybody who might have important insight in relation to practice-based adaptation across the globe.

What’s in an image?

However, images are also challenging. Contemporary forms of mass communication often portray images that depict what adaptation to climate change might look like. However, an exploration of adaptation imagery portrayed in media outlets, image banks, social media, reports and so on shows that this imagery is somewhat limited. It most often focuses on adaptation solutions (i.e. green infrastructure: trees, gardens, green roofs, parks, etc.); it is difficult to find images that portray procedural concepts, such as environmental justice, or maladaptation; it is also not inclusive and representative of all cultures and geographical contexts and there is a great mix and match of image types (cartoons, real photographs, architectural drawings, etc.) lacking in uniformity.

Clearly, representing all the angles of urban adaptation through existing imagery is not a straightforward task. So, how can this challenge be overcome? Here is what we did:

The team behind the ERC-funded project IMAGINE Adaptation decided that in order to use images of what adapted cities would look like, there was a need to create bespoke representations for each of the 31 identified concepts. For this purpose, Josune Urrutia, an illustrator based in Bilbao, was brought on to the team. With briefs carefully designed by the team explaining each of these concepts, Josune designed 31 images. These images include solutions as well as procedural concepts, they have a very clear uniform style and are inclusive of different cultures and geographical locations. This art and science collaboration represents a huge effort to reflect different people and cities of the world with different views on adaptation.

Local adaptation experts participating in this study have the potential to contribute to this timely and necessary debate, about how we can define and, consequently, measure, evaluate and learn from urban adaptation to climate change.

Illustrator: Josune Urrutia Asua

Funded by the European Union (ERC, IMAGINE adaptation, 101039429). Views and opinions expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

👋 You can write an article like this one! Share your thoughts with a community of public servants. Learn more

(Image Credit: Unsplash)