Adapting the politics for climate change strategy

While efforts to limit greenhouse gas emissions continue, it is widely accepted that some level of climate change is inevitable, even if binding limits are set. Political actors at every level have a role to play in developing adaptation strategies, says Carina Keskitalo of Umea University.

Reducing greenhouse gas emissions lies at the core of international efforts to deal with climate change. However, evidence suggests that this and other mitigation strategies will not be sufficient to prevent significant environmental change over the coming years, including increased flood risk and rising sea levels, changes to which countries will need to adapt. According to Carina Keskitalo, the overall coordinator of the Organising Adaptation to Climate Change in Europe (EUR-ADAPT) project funded by the Swedish Research Council, a nation’s political system has a significant influence on its ability to take the necessary action. EUR-ADAPT is novel in that it discusses adaptation as a multi-level issue in relation to different national systems, drawing upon significant data on local, regional and national levels.

“The overall goal of the project is to look at how different countries with different systems try to deal with climate adaptation. We view adaptation as a multi-level governance issue, so we are looking at what is happening at the local, regional and national level in four very different countries,” she says. The four main cases – the UK, Sweden, Finland and Italy – are all unitary states; however, there are significant differences between their systems of governance. “The UK is very centralised as a state, so the government can pretty much steer what will happen at the local and regional levels,” continues Keskitalo. “By contrast Sweden and Finland are much more de-centralised, which means Swedish municipalities have much greater scope to determine local planning themselves – the state can’t steer all of it. Meanwhile Italy has maybe been less focused on environmental policy; it has a very regionalised system, where the regions steer quite a lot, but they still don’t have a lot of money from the state. We are trying to look at how these very different state systems can actually deal with adaptation.” The study has also more briefly viewed other cases of adaptation in industrialised states in and outside Europe, as well as the role of adaptation at EU level.

These particular cases illustrate some relevant characteristics of different political systems in relation to adaptation. In Sweden, the de-centralised political system creates large differences between municipalities in terms of their commitment to developing climate change adaptation strategies: this varies according to municipality size, vulnerability to climate change and wealth – the latter being particularly important. “General adaptive capacity is closely related to funding. A municipality like Gothenburg – or a highly populated region in the UK – can employ people to deal with climate change adaptation. But we also looked at a municipality in Sweden which had a population of just 5,000 people; they have to make decisions for their local area but they haven’t got the funds to pay 10 people to work on adaptation,” she outlines.

Adaptation strategies are a higher priority in areas where extreme weather – particularly that linked directly to climate change – has occurred. This demonstrates the benefit of having a clear direction of research. “Networks of municipalities have been established that voluntarily deliver adaptation strategies. One of my interviewees said that the government could not have set up binding measures – as has now been done in the UK – on adaptation without the existence of such a network on local authority level. So climate adaptation is not just about central government.”

Still, governments are important to developing strategies and some countries, such as Italy, are struggling with strategies because of governmental issues. “There’s been a lot of political change in Italy and they also have a very regionalised system. They have a less developed foresight planning system – they plan reactively and tend to deal with things following a catastrophe rather than preparatory,” explains Keskitalo.

However, the IPCC’s (Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change) mitigation scenarios – ranging from optimistic to pessimistic – all likely to lead to environmental change, so the need for effective national climate adaptation strategies with solid policy seems clear, especially for countries such as Italy and Greece that don't have the scientific impetus for change that Sweden, Finland and the UK do.

Environmental issues often cross physical borders, meaning climate adaptation is not just a national issue, and must also be dealt with at the supra-national level. Keskitalo says the EU’s current position on climate adaptation is not fully-formed, something which she believes will be an important part of future environmental legislation. “Member states are legally bound to implement EU directives. In future, if there is an EU directive that says you have to preserve water quality, and it doesn’t take adaptation to climate change into account, then the risk of areas around reservoirs being flooded with impacts on water quality may not be built in,” she says. Luckily, planning legislation that may have to change to include environmental policies are becoming more accepted.

But adaptation isn’t only an issue for developing states. “Many people thought developed countries could adapt quite easily, but actually rich or industrialised states often have lots of infrastructure in low-lying areas, because traditionally people have liked to live by rivers on flood plains,” points out Keskitalo. “We are unlikely to abandon places like Gothenburg that are at risk of flooding, but we have to look at flood defences and what we can do to ‘climate proof’ our cities. Improved tunnel systems are one possibility; in Sweden we are considering building tunnels to which some of the overflow water from a major lake could be redirected. That would be a huge infrastructural project, and would be extremely expensive, but these are the kinds of things we must think about if we are to protect our cities and other areas vulnerable to climate change.”

For more information on the research, contact Carina H. Keskitalo at Carina.Keskitalo@geography.ume.se

Published: Tuesday, 9th March 2010 by Tom Freeman

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