Marta Olazabal (Spain) 1; Maria Ruiz De Gopegui (Spain) 1
1 - Basque Centre for Climate Change, BC3
The ability to track adaptation progress is not only important to evaluate goals consecution and develop learning processes, but also, it is highly relevant for governments and the private sector at different scales looking to effectively adapt and allocate and prioritise their investments. Given the lack of implementation and monitoring activities related to adaptation, efforts related to adaptation tracking have so far focused on measuring the adaptation policy process: what are governments actually doing?
Local climate adaptation planning is an increasingly important component of the international climate policy agenda. It is therefore critical to evaluate if and how local authorities are acting to adapt and whether local climate adaptation plans are on track to effectively reduce future risks. Here we present a global urban adaptation tracking study on 120 coastal cities around the world. We identify and analyse adaptation policies and present an innovative risk-based approach to measure if and how these initiatives consider and face future coastal risks. Methods include a systematic review protocol to identify adaptation initiatives, a conceptual framework for the characterization of adaptation initiatives (Olazabal et al. 2017) and local-specific risk-damage functions (Abadie et al. 2017, 2018). Results show an overview of global policy action on the set of coastal cities. This is an ongoing study funded by AXA Research Fund and the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.