Identification and Prioritisation of Adaptation for Climate Smart City

Following the Climate Risk and Vulnerability Assessment, the next step is to identify and prioritise adaptation options. City must first identify and create catalogue on all adaptation options that for their specific context. New and innovative adaptation strategies are required to cope with the novel and unique challenge of climate change. City can then choose the best strategies that suit the local context by assessing the effectiveness in reducing vulnerability & exposure, increasing coping & adaptive capacity and the wider impact on sustainability. City should select the strategies that are appropriate with their own economic and human capacity resource limitations. The assessment should focus on factors such as the urgency of the climate risk, feasibility, financial costs, ease of integration into existing institutional arrangements and impacts on other social, environmental, or economic objectives. 

UN Habitat encourages Climate Smart Cities to rank the adaptation and mitigation strategies that are the most effective and develop them into concrete actions. This includes division of responsibilities to city stakeholders so that adaptation to climate change can be undertaken in a coordinated manner that takes advantage of cross-sectoral synergies and achieves multiple benefit simultaneously. To monitor, evaluate and learn from the plan; the crystallization of actions into concrete targets with measurable and verifiable benchmarks are required to assess the progress. Such an exercise would reveal the efficacy of agreed actions and provide the basis for additions, adjustments or cessation of certain actions based on their effects

Reference:

Urban Planning Law for Climate Smart Cities: The Urban Law Module of the Law and Climate Change Toolkit by UN Habitat

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