Adapting urban areas to climate change: a necessary evil or a world of opportunities?
By Kyra Wouters
Urban areas are having trouble adapting to weather extremes and omitting weather related hazards, which will only worsen in the future due to the climate change. This climate change will have far-reaching implications for both average and extreme weather characteristics, which will result in more hazardous events. In order to omit the impact of these hazards it is necessary to adapt the urban areas to increase their resilience. This adaptation can be done by using grey measures, which are artificial measures that use man-made solutions. However, blue-green measures can be used as well, which are measures that incorporate natural and semi-natural green and blue spaces. Blue-green measure can have many additional benefits for the stakeholders, making these measures more attractive and feasible than the traditional grey measures. However, the difficulty lies in implementing adaptive measures, as urban areas are densely built and have many stakeholders present. This creates the need to include climate adaptation in the urban planning and spatial planning processes, which makes the decision-making process very complex. In order to make it easier to come up with adaptation plans that are accepted and can be executed, the engagement of the stakeholders in these processes is necessary. This can be done with the support of planning support systems, like the Adaptation Support Tool which has been developed by Deltares. The main goal of this tool is to support its users during program development and conceptual design, by offering information on possible grey and blue-green measures and their effectiveness. The tool allows users to situate measures in the project area and gives information on the effectiveness of the measures for the climate resilience and cost. In practice, it turns out that the stakeholders use different interests and effects as motive to select measures. In order to increase the support the tool provides, these interests and effects should be included in the tool.
Looking into the methods other planning support tools use to value the effects of urban development, shows that the same aspects keep returning in the other tools. This might be an indication that these aspects are the main interests of the stakeholders in urban development. This assumption was tested by interviewing the main group of stakeholders in urban development, the municipalities and the landscape architects that have much experience working for municipalities. In these semi-structured interviews the important interests in urban development were determined and the required representation of the information on these was discussed. The results of these interviews show that the interests of importance are the social cohesion, perception of the surroundings, safety, mobility, health and parking. These interests show large similarities with the aspects found in the other tools, leading to the conclusion that these are important and should be included in the tool. The results for the representation of the information on these interests is more diffuse and three different demands can be found, namely representation based on monetary units, qualitative representation and visual representation.
Before including these interests, it was determined what requirements the information should meet for the additional information to be useful and reliable. Based on these requirements, the selected interests for inclusion in the tool are the perception of the surroundings, the social cohesion, the safety and health. For each of these four interests, indicators were determined that reflect on the characteristics and mechanisms behind the effects of the measures for each interest. Every measure in the tool was ranked for these indicators based on a qualitative ranking scale. With the help of these ranks and indicators the calculations could be made and included in the Adaptation Support Tool. By using these calculations the Adaptation Support Tool now can show the effectiveness of the blue-green measures for these four interests.
It was expected that the inclusion of these interests would improve the support of the Adaptation Support Tool. This assumption was tested with a workshop in which student teams used the tool to make a conceptual design for an urban area in Delft. The results show two very different approaches and uses of the tool and the information in it. Overall, the results indicate that the added information could increase the support for the stakeholders that are not solely interested in the climate resilience of their design. However, the fact that the workshop was organised for two small student teams, makes the results less reliable.
The conclusion of this research is that it is possible to include some of the important interests of the stakeholders in the Adaptation Support Tool. This can be done by using indicators that reflect on the mechanisms behind the effects for these interests. The result of this thesis shows a first indication that this added information could increase the support of the Adaptation Support Tool and make it better applicable for the large diversity of possible users. However, further evaluation with more participants could shed further light on the effectiveness of the inclusion.