Urban climate justice and community participation: towards inclusive adaptation strategies

Cities are considered the most vulnerable areas to climate risk since they are strongly affected by the impacts of climate change, mainly extreme events.

Despite most cities worldwide are developing adaptation plans, scarce consideration is given to the unequal impacts of climate change and adaptation actions, raising scholars attention on the issue of justice. Furthermore, such plans lack standardized approaches to perform holistic and integrated analysis of risk.

Answering to this urgent challenge is at the core of the climate debate in cities.

RESTART aims to re-address the discussion by focusing on the issue of justice to face climate change in cities, by integrating the three dimensions of climate justice (procedural, distributional, recognitional) and designing an operational framework for the adoption of a model for just and inclusive adaptation plans.

Padua (Italy) and Tempe (US) represent two paradigmatic case studies for climate extremes (heatwaves) where I aim to respond to three timely and ambitious objectives: SO1) mapping the spatial distribution of heatwave hazard, SO2) identifying the distribution of the present adaptive capacity of cities (distributional justice) and recognizing the socio-economic vulnerabilities of citizens (recognitional justice), and SO3) implementing a spatially-based and inclusive methodology (procedural justice) that integrates SO1 and SO2 results to identify and map the urban sectors and population to be prioritized.

The GIScience interdisciplinary approach is adopted to integrate the complex dimensions of heatwave hazard, socio-economic vulnerabilities, and adaptive capacity of urban territory, by combining quali-quantitative approaches, with the added value to include stakeholders perceptions.

In conclusion, RESTART will contribute to a replicable standardized methodology that facilitates holistic analysis of (in)equity and (in)justice to be incorporated in European and international adaptation strategies and plans.