A Governing Framework for Climate Change Adaptation in the Built Environment

Abstract

ABSTRACT. Developing an approach to governing adaptation to climate change is severely hampered by the dictatorship of the present when the needs of future generations are inadequately represented in current policy making. We posit this problem as a function of the attributes of adaptation policy making, including deep uncertainty and nonstationarity, where past observations are not reliable predictors of future outcomes. Our research links organizational decision-making attributes with adaptation decision making and identifies cases in which adaptation actions cause spillovers, free riding, and distributional impacts. We develop a governing framework for adaptation that we believe will enable policy, planning, and major long-term development decisions to be made appropriately at all levels of government in the face of the deep uncertainty and nonstationarity caused by climate change. Our framework requires that approval of projects with an expected life span of 30 years or more in the built environment include minimum building standards that integrate forecasted climate change impacts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) intermediate scenario. The intermediate IPCC scenario must be downscaled to include local or regional temperature, water availability, sea level rise, susceptibility to forest fires, and human habitation impacts to minimize climate-change risks to the built environment. The minimum standard is systematically updated every six years to facilitate learning by formal and informal organizations. As a minimum standard, the governance framework allows jurisdictions to take stronger actions to increase their climate resilience and thus maintain system flexibility.

The governance of adaptation: choices, reasons, and effects. Introduction to the Special Feature

“…Second, they highlight the strong focus of many organizations on the present; Mazmanian et al (2013) speak of "the dictatorship of the present." Bates et al (2013) suggest that for business organizations, circumspection is understandable given the level of uncertainty and lack of guidelines for climate change in Australia.…”

“…The contributions on this theme suggest, on the one hand, the loss of predictability in relation to our climate (Mazmanian et al 2013 speak of the "the death of stationarity"). Second, they highlight the strong focus of many organizations on the present; Mazmanian et al (2013) speak of "the dictatorship of the present."…”

“…Mazmanian et al (2013) join the call for a more scaled down version of climate change projections generated by the IPCC, which would mean that local and regional actors have a more solid basis for developing policy.…”

Distributional effects of flood risk management—a cross-country comparison of preflood compensation

“…Most of these address the issue from an economic perspective (Flores and Thacher 2002) or a geographical perspective (Adger et al 2005, Solecki et al 2011. Social scientists have also addressed this issue (Mazmanian et al 2013). Loss can be seen as a distributional effect (Fullerton 2009).…”

Material and Social Construction: A Framework for the Adaptation of Buildings

“…Instead, it merely acknowledges that the systems behind such forces have separate and unique capacities and cycles to accommodate change, even if such capacities and cycles are reciprocally dependent in some measure on the design and operations of a building. Inherent in this exercise is an acknowledgment that the problem-solution set cannot be entirely optimized or engineered given the socio-ecological complexity of the challenges which are yet to be known (Bulkeley and Betsill 2013;Mazmanian et al 2013;Ovink 2014). As such, adaptation at the scale referenced herein is a set of dynamic multi-scalar systematic processes which are referenced to a variety of stimuli that are not exclusively physical, ecological or climatic in their proximate degrees of influence.…”