Climate Resilient Cities: An Opportunity For Framing Mitigation And Adaptation Strategies

Climate change is one of the main environmental issues of the 21st century (IPCC, 2011). It poses a serious challenge for cities all over the world that, on the one hand, show a high level of vulnerability in face of the impacts of climate change, on the other hand, are responsible for 60% to 80% of global energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, which represent the main causes of the change in climate conditions. In 2011, 73% of European population was living in urban areas and the level of urbanization is expected to be at 82% by 2050 (UN, 2012). According to the trends of population growth and in case of lack of significant counterbalancing measures, consumptions and emissions as well as impacts of climate-related phenomena could even worsen in the next future. Nevertheless, although cities have large responsibilities for changing climate conditions, they could play, on the opposite, a key role for reversing current trends (Huq et al., 2007; World Bank, 2010; EU, 2011). At present, scientific literature as well as decision makers at European and local scales are devoting larger and larger attention to strategies for enhancing both mitigative and adaptive capacities of cities in order to reduce emissions and, in the meanwhile, enable cities to deal with the effects of climate change (Davoudi, 2009). Despite the significant efforts, adaptation and mitigation measure are often implemented separately (Swart and Raes 2007, Ayers and Huq, 2008; Davoudi, 2009), policies on city level are still fragmented and effective tools to support decision-making processes are still lacking. In order to fill these gaps, numerous scholars are focusing on the key role that the resilience concept could play for framing urban policies in face of climate change and climate-related phenomena (Newmann et al. 2009; Fünfgeld and McEvoy, 2012; Tyler and Moench, 2012). Nevertheless, only few of them provide hints for identifying the features that make a city resilient in face of climate change or for translating the resilience concept, which is still a controversial term, into practice. Therefore, grounding on previous studies on the resilience concepts and by integrating different disciplinary perspectives, this paper outlines the set of capacities that characterize a resilient system, providing a conceptual framework for driving planners and decision-makers in building up climate resilient cities. Then, based on the review of the main mitigation and adaptation measures currently implemented at urban scale in Europe, the contribution focuses on two main points: if and to what extent the most widespread measures match with identified resilience capacities and if a resilience-based approach may allow to sketch out new and more effective measures to tackle climate change and climate related phenomena.