Matching cities by their climate change measures and blockages profile for mutual-learning.

Abstract

More and more cities are working on climate resilience by adding climate adaptive measures to their mitigation programs, but choices must be made and barriers must be overcome, as shown by the extensive research in this area, including our own previously conducted exploratory research (Sanders & Oliveira, 2020). The motivation for new follow-up research has been to develop an instrument with which cities can compare each other’s climate programs, to find the right city partner to start a process of joint learning from each other. After studying current research classifying cities' climate adaptive measures, implemented or in planning, most research is into processes to help cities find the right measures, it has been concluded that the level of detail on which this research generally focuses is too detailed to help cities comparing to find their matching city partner. That is why it was ultimately decided to extent our own diagram from the aforementioned exploratory research, which is less abstract, with the aim of providing cities with this improved instrument. It should be noted that given the higher level of detail, we should speak of blockages rather than barriers. The recent results of the H2020 Marie Curie 'SOS Climate Waterfront' study were used to test this improved diagram, as data on climate adaptive measures from six European coastal cities recently became available. A test diagram was then generated for each of these cities and matching has been selected to evaluate the diagram, in order to make a well-functioning instrument available. The final conclusion is that the diagram provides a recognizable matching for the six SOS cities, but that improvement of the diagram is recommended during further use.