Adaptation to climate change in urban areas: Climate-greening London, Rotterdam, and Toronto

This article aims to gain insight into the governance capacity of cities to adapt to climate through urban green planning, which we will refer to as climate-greening. The use of green is considered a no-regrets adaptation strategy, since it not only absorbs rainfall and moderates, but simultaneously can contribute to the sustainable development of urban areas. However, space competes with other socio-economic interests that also require space. Urban planning can among competing demands for land use, and, as such, is potentially useful for the governance adaptation. Through an in-depth case study of three frontrunners in adaptation planning (London, , and Toronto), the governance capacity for climate-greening urban areas is analysed and. The framework we have developed utilizes five sub-capacities: legal, managerial, political, , and learning. The overall conclusion from the case studies is that the legal and political subcapacities the strongest. The resource and learning sub-capacities are relatively weak, but offer growth potential. The managerial sub-capacity is constrained by compartmentalization and fragmentation, two key barriers to governance capacity. These are effectively blocking the of adaptation in urban planning. The biggest opportunities to enhance governance capacity in the integration of adaptation considerations into urban-planning processes, the establishment of links adaptation and mitigation policies, investment in training programmes for staff and stakeholders adaptation planning, and providing infrastructure for learning processes.