Putting People at the Center of Climate Change Adaptation Plans: A Vulnerability Approach

The majority of research and writing on climate change and planning focuses on mitigation, reducing emissions and climate change impacts over long time cycles. However, the realization that human settlements will see immediate and near‐term impacts, regardless of emissions reductions, has given urgency to questions about how communities will adapt. We are interested in municipal level adaptation plans: “incipient plans” where implementation has either just begun or not even started, and evaluation and rethinking belong to the future. Our intention is to inform this process. We reviewed more than a dozen municipal and regional climate change and adaptation planning processes, and selected six to examine further. Our case selection includes plans from coastal and inland cities, both large and small, and all but one are from counties amongst the most vulnerable in the U.S. We found that while mitigation of green house gases (GHGs), which is important and necessary, was central to all plans, adaptation strategies were not considered to the same extent or left out completely. We argue that an adaptation strategy that uses a vulnerability approach can be the most effective way to assess climate risk because it puts people and communities at the center of the analysis; helps planners and policy makers to design adaptation strategies that will reduce suffering in local areas while making effective use of scarce resources; and enables better coordination among different elements of planning. To be efficient and effective, adaptation plans must be generated at different scales and must downscale climate information to a local level. Most importantly, the first step in adaptation planning must be to understand vulnerability and the full range of variables that contribute to it. We conclude by suggesting that cities must integrate climate action strategies into their long‐range Comprehensive Plans to take full advantage of the targeting and coordination possibilities that a vulnerability approach offers.