Urban responses to climate change: Framework for decisionmaking and supporting indicators
This report considers how analysis can inform and support decision-making in complex urban areas and focuses specifically on the difficult choices among strategies and allocation of resources in response to climate change and in pursuit of greenhouse gas emissions reductions.
Field studies are being used to test the practicality and utility of the methods and structuring of indicators proposed in this report. The intention of the report is for the methods and study results, if found to be practical and useful, to be broadly applicable to early-adopting practitioners and planners interested in shaping and implementing effective urban responses to climate change.
The report finds that risk governance is an appropriate decision framework for addressing the challenges of urban climate change. It has the capacity to encompass a multiple-actor, decision-centric perspective and is well-suited for accommodating both technical analyses and values-based issues. The authors added three enhancements to the framework: decision support under conditions of deep uncertainty, iterative risk management and learning, and three "tiers of transformation" to capture the changes in governance needed to reduce risk to acceptable levels.