Highlights
Assess role of techno-scientific expertise in governing urban environmental change.
Evaluate evidence-driven built environment and greenspace policy in Fukuoka.
Epistemic community shapes Fukuoka’s built environment and greenspace policy.
Local history gives favourable context for environmental science in public interest.
Findings nuance understanding of how epistemic communities work at urban scale.
Highlights
Cooling behaviours an area of increasing interest under rising heat in cities.
Survey of public in Fukuoka, Japan, assesses cooling behaviour and climate awareness.
Some people use air conditioning with mitigation focus, others emphasise adaptation.
Those emphasising mitigation have lower bills and more likely to engage in other behaviours.
Messaging on air conditioning use and promoting urban greening may enable co-benefits.
This paper profiles Fukuoka City in Kyushu, Japan. We focus on the city's local climate change adaptation policies, and in particular the role of urban and greenspace planning in facilitating adaptation actions within Fukuoka. Fukuoka is a humid subtropical city which is currently experiencing significant population and economic growth. It has also made comparatively rigorous advances in climate adaptation, in a country context where local governments have been criticised for focusing more on mitigation. Fukuoka hence may yield lessons for other rapidly urbanising subtropical Asian cities. We illustrate that Fukuoka has a long tradition of science-policy connection towards the creation of a liveable urban environment. This creates a favourable research and policy infrastructure for adaptation, in particular mitigation of heat risk. This is evidenced in consideration of climate issues within the city's greenspace plans since the 1990s, and in an extensive body of underpinning applied research from local institutions into urban thermal environments in particular. Fukuoka's green terraced ACROS building has come to symbolise adaptation via the built environment, and has been followed by the emergence of further green roofs and through citizen and private sector involvement in smaller-scale greening actions. We caution that challenges remain around connecting different sections of local governments, and in maintaining climate and environmental imperatives in the face of ongoing development and expansion pressures.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.