Search

Successful recoveries of households in the aftermath of extreme weather events are key to avoid long-term poverty implications. Yet, in frequently hit regions, there may not always be enough time for households to recover in-between recurrent events. There is a common narrative that the resulting incomplete recoveries aggravate adverse impacts, but there may also be counteracting mechanisms where a cluster of events leads to less destruction than a series of well-separated events because, after the first events, there are less assets left that can be destroyed by the subsequent events. To develop a systematic quantitative understanding for the interplay of the different mechanisms, we extend an agent-based household model to recurrent floods and study their welfare effects in the Philippines in dependence of household exposure and income. We find that incomplete recoveries increase cumulative consumption and well-being losses across the study period 2000-2018 by 50%. While low-income households suffer the highest well-being losses, lower-middle income households experience the largest relative increase in well-being (240%) and consumption losses (120%) due to incomplete recoveries. Our results show that the impacts of recurrent extreme weather events on households are not additive. In consequence, the well-being and consumption losses can be critically underestimated when concluding from the poverty implications of an individual event on the implications of recurrent events, as usually done in conventional disaster risk management. Thus, accounting for incomplete recoveries may allow to develop more effective risk management strategies and better prepare societies for an intensification of these events under global warming.

This paper describes the rationale and the protocol of the first component of the third simulation round of the Inter-Sectoral Impact Model Intercomparison Project (ISIMIP3a, www.isimip.org) and the associated set of climate-related and direct human forcing data (CRF and DHF, respectively). The observation-based climate-related forcings for the first time include high-resolution observational climate forcings derived by orographic downscaling, monthly to hourly coastal water levels, and wind fields associated with historical tropical cyclones. The DHFs include land use patterns, population densities, information about water and agricultural management, and fishing intensities. The ISIMIP3a impact model simulations driven by these observation-based climate-related and direct human forcings are designed to test to what degree the impact models can explain observed changes in natural and human systems. In a second set of ISIMIP3a experiments the participating impact models are forced by the same DHFs but a counterfactual set of atmospheric forcings and coastal water levels where observed trends have been removed. These experiments are designed to allow for the attribution of observed changes in natural, human and managed systems to climate change, rising CH4 and CO2 concentrations, and sea level rise according to the definition of the Working Group II contribution to the IPCC AR6.

Coastal cities are exposed to high risks due to climate change, as they are potentially affected by both rising sea levels and increasingly intense and frequent coastal storms. Socio-economic drivers also increase exposure to natural hazards, accelerate environmental degradation, and require adaptive governance structures to moderate negative impacts. Here, we use a social network analysis (SNA) combined with further qualitative information to identify barriers and enablers of adaptive governance in the Barcelona metropolitan area. By analyzing how climate change adaptation is mainstreamed between different administrative scales as well as different societal actors, we can determine the governance structures and external conditions that hamper or foster strategical adaptation plans from being used as operational adaptation tools. We identify a diverse set of stakeholders acting at different administrative levels (local to national), in public administration, science, civil society, and the tourism economy. The metropolitan administration acts as an important bridging organization by promoting climate change adaptation to different interest groups and by passing knowledge between actors. Nonetheless, national adaptation planning fails to take into account local experiences in coastal protection, which leads to an ineffective science policy interaction and limits adaptive management and learning opportunities. Overcoming this is difficult, however, as the effectiveness of local adaptation strategies in the Barcelona metropolitan area is very limited due to a strong centralization of power at the national level and a lack of polycentricity. Due to the high touristic pressure, the legal framework is currently oriented to primarily meet the demands of recreational use and tourism, prioritizing these aspects in daily management practice. Therefore, touristic and economic activities need to be aligned to adaptation efforts, to convert them from barriers into drivers for adaptation action. Our work strongly suggests that more effectively embedding adaptation planning and action into existing legal structures of coastal management would allow strategic adaptation plans to be an effective operational tool for local coastal governance., Mitigation and Adaptation Strategies for Global Change, 26 (4), ISSN:1381-2386, ISSN:1573-1596