Track 12: Climate Change: Urban Governance and Everyday Life
Chaired by Ingemar Elander (ingemar.elander@sam.oru.se), Rolf Lidskog (rolf.lidskog@sam.oru.se) and Ylva Uggla (ylva.uggla@sam.oru.se), Center for Urban and Regional Research, Örebro University
Climate change is one of the most challenging global issues today. It deeply affects the conditions of everyday life and calls for action by voluntary organizations, private companies and governments at all sectors of society. The main policy responses to climate change, as established in the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), are mitigation and adaptation .
Thus far the main response to climate change has been mitigation . Notably, the Kyoto Protocol supplements the Convention with legally-binding targets for limiting or reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. National policies based on this agreement are crucial in terms of enacting codes with regard to energy, transport and other relevant sectors.
However, international agreements and national policies are not enough as climate change does not acknowledge any political or administrative borders. Thus, climate change must be met through multi-level governance, including a broad range of actors. Representing sites of high consumption of energy and extensive transport, towns and cities are crucial when it comes to climate change mitigation. The influence of local authorities over these processes varies with national circumstances but may include mitigating initiatives in terms of energy supply and management, transport supply and demand, land use planning, building requirements, waste management and advice to the local community. National and cross-national networks between cities are also becoming commonplace within this rescaled landscape of governance.
Although climate related action so far has laid the focus on mitigation there is an increasing emphasis on adaptation. Thus the European Commission recently announced a new phase of the European Climate Change Program, including measures of adaptation. The reason for this turn is that even with an energetic climate policy to reduce GHG emissions a substantial degree of climate change is now understood to be inevitable. Climate change is a complex issue imbued with uncertainty, where climate scenarios are used to provide images of possible futures. Although climate change is mostly communicated in terms of global average values of weather data, adaptation has a local and regional basis. Climate change adaptation, thus, is an issue of urban risk. Although there is a lack of knowledge to predict local and regional consequences the matter cannot be disregarded. Furthermore, climate adaptation is a policy domain under formation, i.e. the matter is not yet institutionalized and responsibilities are unspecified and unclear. This obscurity may lead to inactivity and confusion. At the same time, it opens an arena for various public and private actors to take initiative, set the agenda and define the issue and their own role in climate change adaptation.
However, climate change is only one amongst a multitude of challenges facing towns and cities, and their ambitions to respond to climate change may be counteracted by competing policy priorities. Processes of globalisation have triggered cities to become strongly entrepreneurial as well as becoming sites of extensive in-migration accompanied by increasing social exclusion and segregation. Giving priority to meeting these challenges does not necessarily harmonize with climate change policy ambitions. Thus, when analysing the role of towns and cities with regard to climate change these conflicting pressures must also be taken into consideration. In addition, local climate change policies also have to be analysed in terms of the way governing is organized. For example, what role do representative democratic institutions play in this context as compared to initiatives of a more participatory or deliberative kind?
Papers on the following topics are welcomed to be presented and discussed at this track:
• Towns and cities networking for climate change mitigation and adaptation
• Local mitigation of climate change in the areas of transport, energy and planning
• Mitigation and adaptation initiatives by voluntary organizations and individuals in civil society
• The handling of uncertainty and the role of science in climate change adaptation
• Scientific and popular discourses in reporting on local climate change mitigation and adaptation
• Various forms of governance involved in urban climate change mitigation and adaptation
Case studies and comparative studies of climate change mitigation and adaptation are welcomed as are broader surveys of such initiatives as well as more theoretical articles on the topic.
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