FAQs

Adaptation measures have been collected by ICARIA multidisciplinary researchers from existing scientific literature and other relevant sources to support climate change action, considering all hazards included in the Project ICARIA framework, including compound events. The aim is to offer a holistic vision of adaptation, including physical aspects, as well as economic and welfare impacts, the latter measured through social, environmental and economic co-benefits. Additionally, the platform offers an interactive guide to design, evaluate and prioritise Adaptation Strategies, offering different criteria to do so - giving freedom to the user to define it based on the priorities of the decision makers.

For further information regarding the prioritization methodology see Guerrero-Hidalga et al. (2020).

Guerrero-Hidalga, M., Martínez-Gomariz, E., Evans, B., Webber, J., Termes-Rifé, M., Russo, B., Locatelli, L., 2020. Methodology to Prioritize Climate Adaptation Measures in Urban Areas. Barcelona and Bristol Case Studies. Sustain. 2020, Vol. 12, Page 4807 12, 4807. https://doi.org/10.3390/SU12124807

The main user of this platform is expected to be a decision-maker at different territorial levels, e.g. regional, supramunicipal and local.

It is also intended for all those involved in climate adaptation actions, such as students, researchers, policy analysts. You are more than welcome to register and assess the most beneficial strategies for their territories.

No, it is not necessary to register to see the adaptation measures. A database of more than 200 climate adaptation measures is publicly available. These measures were created based on the most updated applied research at EU level.

Registered users can create tailored adaptation strategies, and compile related measures, compare them under different scenarios, and prioritise them according to the relevant criteria of the users. Results can be downloadable free of charge.

Yes, when you create a new strategy you can either select available measures from the database, or create new measures if none of the existing ones suit the strategy of the study area. They will remain private if you don't want to publish them. This means that new measures will not be added to the public database automatically, although you can opt-in and the development team will review and publish them.

Yes, a sample strategy is available in the strategy section, after logging in, to help users with a step-by-step guide to create a specific strategy for their urban areas. It uses previous results, and offers costs and effectiveness estimates calculated in previous studies, as well as risks reduction, expected damages and changes in ecosystem services provision for a stormwater flooding impacts reduction strategy in a 1.5 million inhabitants city.

The purpose of this strategy is to facilitate the users to understand the methodological process behind it, and also to have a reference of magnitudes in the case their study areas do not have any specific adaptation study. However, the ideal is to obtain tailored figures that account for the particularities of the area and its society, as costs, benefits and the different impacts are dependent on many different factors and cannot be directly transferred from one site to another. Please refer to state-of-the-art publications or EU-level studies such as the ones available in the European Union's main site for Adaptation Strategies, Climate-Adapt.

The evidence suggests that citizens are more likely to take action on climate change, or more likely to support governments that take action on climate change, if the wider co-benefits of those actions are emphasised (Bain et al. 2015). Additionally, attention should be paid to the socio-economic transformations in the context of climate change adaptation, needed for rooted and effective long term impacts. In this sense, it is important to address them when evaluating and presenting the policy options.

To do so, the ICARIA research team used the methodology proposed by the C40 and the London School of Economics (LSE), "Co-benefits of urban climate action: A framework for cities" (Floater, G., et al., 2016), available in this link: lsecities.net/co-benefits. The co-benefits classification found in this website, it is also based on their findings. In a first round of workshops, there was a selection of indicators from the co-benefits standardisation framework in the C40 reference publication. From their extensive framework, a multidisciplinary group of experts selected indicators relevant to resilience and urban services. They were classified by economic, social, and environmental co-benefits (as in the measures details while creating an strategy).

In a second workshop, the experts working group was asked to score every measure under the selected indicators using a 0 to 10 scoring system. There was a discussion and voting exercise for each indicator and measure, and consensus was found through a session facilitator. Average values were estimated for each category of co-benefit, in order to include average values per category for each measure in the ranking exercise.

To the users of this platform, we recommend to follow the approach of the second stage, which consists in gathering a multidisciplinary experts group that is able to give an informed evaluation about the main economic, social and environmental co-benefits provided by each measure in the form of a score (1-10).

The results of the ICARIA exercise are shown as a sample, to provide support to those users that are not able to carry out the recommended workshop. However, as every city has a different context, the scores are expected to differ from site to site.