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Flood risk in urban areas around the world is increasing due to socio-economic development and climate change. Urban climate adaptation measures are beneficial over the longer term, particularly in coastal areas, yet the upfront costs of such measures are significant. Moreover, public actors responsible for adaptation to flood risk face constrained budgets. A promising strategy for overcoming these constraints and enabling greater adaptation investment is land reclamation that includes adaptation, i.e. flood risk reduction. Land reclamation in high-value urban areas can generate substantial revenues through the sale or lease of new land, or taxes on increased economic activities, thus offsetting public adaptation investments. This paper explores the potential of land reclamation for leveraging public adaptation investments and associated distributional issues, by analysing 3 urban land reclamation and adaptation projects in Germany, the Netherlands and the Maldives. We find that all projects have leveraging potential, and leveraging in projects primarily aimed at land creation is particularly high. Further, due to low adaptation costs needed to protect revenue streams in such projects, these investments appear to be ‘low-regret’. Regarding distributional aspects, high project costs and limited public budgets for adaptation constrain public actors’ ability to ensure equitable outcomes through planning instruments, for example, social housing. Further, in implementation, competition for project benefits can lead to further inequalities. We conclude that urban land reclamation presents a significant opportunity to leverage public adaptation investments under certain conditions. We further outline future research needs including to extend land-based financing theory from related urban infrastructure sectors to inform the design of equitable governance arrangements and to better understand the role of such urban land reclamation projects in regional or national development pathways.

In the field of adaptation governance research, current discussion on the barriers to adaptation shows that theoretical explanations for why institutions emerge and how they enable or constrain adaptation are underdeveloped. In this Perspective, we show that there is a significant opportunity to advance the understanding of adaptation governance by integrating insights that have been developed in the extensive commons literature on the institutions that work to overcome social conflicts or dilemmas. ‘Realist-materialist’ approaches to understanding such collective action are particularly valuable to adaptation governance research because they emphasize how biophysical conditions give rise to certain types of social dilemma. Climate change affects these biophysical conditions, and thus may alter dilemmas or create new ones. Based on realist-materialist reasoning, this Perspective describes six types of dilemma, illustrates each with a case from the adaptation literature and draws on insights from the commons literature regarding relevant contextual conditions and effective policy instruments for overcoming social dilemmas. The dilemma types provide entry points for rigorous comparative adaptation research to deepen understanding of how context influences adaptation governance processes.

Unidad de excelencia María de Maeztu MdM-2015-0552 Analyses of climate adaptation seldom rely on the conceptual toolbox of institutional economics. Yet articles addressing institutions make up a large portion of the climate adaptation literature. With a wealth of institutionally relevant knowledge in the adaptation literature, organizing such knowledge in institutionally meaningful ways can advance the present understanding of the link between institutions and adaptation. Knowing which aspects of this link are well researched, and where in contrast research gaps lie, can provide guidance to institutional economists interested in adaptation. We contribute to this through a systematic review of the adaptation literature, assessing the consideration adaptation scholars give to different elements of the Institutional Analysis and Development framework. Results show a strong focus on collective choice and on adaptation by public actors, with an emphasis on rules in use, social interactions and, to a lesser extent, attributes of the community. Research gaps rather encompass operational and constitutional choice, private adaptation, physical interactions and biophysical conditions.

While methodological choices are critical for solution-oriented adaptation research, the current debate on these is underdeveloped and characterized by simple dichotomies such as bottom-up and top-down as well as vaguely defined concepts such as vulnerability. Adaptation challenges and approaches for addressing them are more diverse than these labels suggest. This paper addresses this deficit by developing a diagnostic framework that helps to identify approaches suitable for addressing a given adaptation challenge. The framework was developed out of the necessity to discuss diverse approaches from natural science, social science and practice in a set of adaptation case studies conducted within the European funded MEDIATION project. Based on these case studies complemented by the literature, we iteratively abstracted typical adaptation challenges researched, typical approaches taken, and empirical, theoretical and normative criteria applied for choosing a particular approach. Our results refine the methodological debate by distinguishing between the three general adaptation challenges of identifying adaptation needs, identifying adaptation measures and appraising adaptation options. Adaptation challenges are further classified according to private and public interest involved, individual or various types of collective action involved, data/model availability, decision-making time horizon, etc. For each type of challenge and approach, we give examples and discuss salient issues. Our results point to the opportunity to apply institutional and behavioural research to support the identification of measures and possibly avoiding barriers in practice. The diagnostic framework also serves as the basis for the forthcoming guidance for assessing vulnerability, impacts and adaptation to be published by the UNEP programme of research on climate change vulnerability, impacts and adaptation.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to present a formal framework of vulnerability to climate change, to address the conceptual confusion around vulnerability and related concepts.Design/methodology/approachThe framework was developed using the method of formalisation – making structure explicit. While mathematics as a precise and general language revealed common structures in a large number of vulnerability definitions and assessments, the framework is here presented by diagrams for a non‐mathematical audience.FindingsVulnerability, in ordinary language, is a measure of possible future harm. Scientific vulnerability definitions from the fields of climate change, poverty, and natural hazards share and refine this structure. While theoretical definitions remain vague, operational definitions, that is, methodologies for assessing vulnerability, occur in three distinct types: evaluate harm for projected future evolutions, evaluate the current capacity to reduce harm, or combine the two. The framework identifies a lack of systematic relationship between theoretical and operational definitions.Originality/valueWhile much conceptual literature tries to clarify vulnerability, formalisation is a new method in this interdisciplinary field. The resulting framework is an analytical tool which supports clear communication: it helps when making assumptions explicit. The mismatch between theoretical and operational definitions is not made explicit in previous work.

Adaptation is heterogeneous and relevant for a range of sectors and levels of decision-making. As adaptation moves up the policy agenda, solution-oriented adaptation research requires addressing questions that are salient to stakeholders and decision-makers at various scales and involves applying a wide range of different methods. Yet while solution-oriented adaptation research is being increasingly undertaken, there is to date a lack of synthesis of these experiences in the literature. In this paper, we aim to address this gap by synthesising findings in nine cases from the MEDIATION project (Methodology for Effective Decision-making on Impacts and AdaptaTION), an EC-funded solution-oriented adaptation research project. We do so by, first, describing methods applied for solution-oriented research in Europe and sequences of methods carried out in individual cases. Second, we assess strengths and weaknesses of individual methods in given empirical situations. Third, we analyse patterns observed in the sequences of methods and reflect on their implications for adaptation research. A strength of our approach is that detailed data on choices of research questions and methods were collected through in-depth and iterative interaction with the case study teams. We find that there is no standard recipe for adaptation; that even though social science methods are often indicated, they are often not applied; and that robust decision-making methods, while available, are often constrained because of their resource intensity. Reflecting on the implications of these findings, we argue that greater flexibility and transdisciplinarity are needed in adaptation research and that social science methods should be further supported. Finally, we find that stakeholder engagement is not a panacea and that engagement requires a more differentiated understanding of stakeholders and careful design in order to be effective.

In many cases in which climate change affects natural resources, impacts are uncertain and adaptation to climate change often involves collective action problems at the local level, which are embedded in multilevel governance regimes. Adaptive management (AM) is an emerging approach to deal with such uncertainty and complexity by promoting multilevel institutions that are robust to change and able to learn. Much of the literature evaluating AM in multilevel governance regimes, however, focuses only on the adherence to certain structural features said to make AM successful, leaving aside the question whether AM actually produces desired outcomes. This paper evaluates AM in multilevel regimes also in terms of the outcomes they produce. To this end, we first apply the Management and Transition Framework (MTF) in order to describe three multilevel regimes in Lesotho. For each regime we then observe whether it adheres to the structure features of AM. Finally, we evaluate the extent to which the outcomes, natural resource management projects, are conducive to Ostrom's (1990) ‘design principles’ for sustainable common-pool resource management. We find that, though no ideal ‘adaptive regime’ is found in Lesotho, the results confirm the AM hypotheses that decentralised decision-making, open information sources, and plurality of user interests lead to improved outcomes. Conversely, elements of the climate regime are found not to be adaptive. Our findings also confirm the appropriateness of AM as a governance approach to climate adaptation.

Adaptation to climate change occurs largely through action at the local level, which is influenced by international and national levels of political and social organization. This article explores the impact of discourse at the international level on adaptation policy at the national and local level. Discourse defines which knowledge claims, methods and rationalities are accepted and reproduced by actors as a basis for policy development and implementation; this is called ‘framing’. Scientific literature defines adaptation and vulnerability in a general way and so accommodates different framings. This article reviews the history of the concepts of adaptation and vulnerability in the literature and their relation to development. Evidence is presented for the presence of two framings of CCIAV in the literature: the ‘decision-analytic’ and the ‘institutional-analytic’. Wetlands and climate-related projects in Lesotho are analysed and evidence is presented for the reproduction of the two framings. A decision-a...

This paper presents two novel web-based applications for disseminating climate change adaptation related information. (i) The MEDIATION Adaptation Platform, one of the core outputs of the European FP7 research project MEDIATION (Methodology for Effective Decision-making on Impacts and AdaptaTION), offers a set of decision trees that can be browsed graphically to navigate over adaptation challenges and available types of methods for addressing them. This framework is interlinked both with a Toolbox and a set of case study descriptions. (ii) ci:grasp-2, the successor of the BMU-funded Climate Impacts: Global and Regional Adaptation Support Platform (ci:grasp), provides access to a growing pool of global and regional information on climate stimuli and impacts, as well as on adaptation projects. The paper identifies central user tasks for both applications and presents interaction metaphors that have been chosen to support users in fulfilling these tasks.

Coastal adaptation can reduce climate change impacts and investing now, thoughcostly, will bring greater benefits over the longer term, particularly in urban areas.Yet public actors currently cover a small fraction of needed coastal adaptation investments, a finance gap set to widen as coastal adaptation costs continue to increase. Mobilizing private finance for coastal adaptation is thus a salient challenge, as emphasized in the Paris Agreement. Key under-researched dimensions of this challenge are what promotes private investment in coastal adaptation and how can public actors’ interest in adaptation be aligned with private investor interests. To address this, we review the literatures on coastal adaptation finance and on financial arrangements involving both public actors and private investors. We describe key actors and interests, and identify coastal financial arrangements that align public actor and private investor interests, finding that private provisioning, public– private Partnerships (PPP), and public debt arrangements are promising. We then survey empirical examples, finding that private provisioning attracts investment when returns are high, for example, in urban real estate, and that PPPs attract dredging and construction companies’ investment, particularly for adaptation measures with a large share of operational costs, for example, beach nourishment. We find little evidence of institutional investment through public debt instruments. A number of policy instruments, for example, concessional loans, tax incentives, and standards, may address this gap and enhance private coastal adaptation investment. Our results are also relevant for other sectors that involve long-term infrastructure adaptation measures.