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The climate is changing, and the Eastern Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region is vulnerable to the consequences. Many of the region's countries are facing warmer temperatures, a changing hydrology, and more extremes, droughts, floods, heat waves, windstorms, and forest fires. This book presents an overview of what adaptation to climate change might mean for Eastern Europe and Central Asia. It starts with a discussion of emerging best-practice adaptation planning around the world and a review of the latest climate projections. It then discusses possible actions to improve resilience organized around impacts on health, natural resources (water, biodiversity, and the coastal environment), the 'unbuilt' environment (agriculture and forestry), and the built environment (infrastructure and housing). The last chapter concludes with a discussion of two areas in great need of strengthening given the changing climate: disaster preparedness and hydro-meteorological services. This book has four key messages: a) contrary to popular perception, Eastern Europe and Central Asia face significant threats from climate change, with a number of the most serious risks already in evidence; b) vulnerability over the next 10 to 20 years is likely to be dominated by socioeconomic factors and legacy issues; c) even countries and sectors that stand to benefit from climate change are poorly positioned to do so; and d) the next decade offers a window of opportunity for ECA countries to make their development more resilient to climate change while reaping numerous co-benefits.

The paradigm of Adaptive Planning and Management provides several methodological approaches for designing robust adaptive plans to cope with uncertain future changes, namely the Adaptation Pathways’ method (APs). These approaches, particularly those containing APs, have captured increasing interest in the field of coastal climate adaptation as useful for guiding its planning and management. While these approaches have been tested in several research cases, there are still few real cases of application into coastal spatial planning instruments. Furthermore, the lack of implementation of coastal adaptation actions in urbanized coasts worldwide, so-called adaptation gaps, points to the need of investigating to what extent these Adaptive Planning approaches containing APs are being applied in coastal plans. A deeper analysis of cases of application of these approaches in coastal plans is required to understand how adaptive plans are being crafted. This article focusses on the two major cases of application of APs-based Adaptive Planning and Management approaches into planning and management instruments – the Thames Estuary 2100 Plan and the Delta Programme – to identify what elements were essential to design an adaptive plan and operationalize an Adaptive Planning and Management approach, including ingredients that the plan had to meet to be robust and adaptive. Our results suggest that at least five elements are required to craft and deliver a robust adaptive plan and accomplish a real Adaptive Planning and Management.

The intersecting challenges of urbanization, growing inequality, climate and environmental risk and economic sustainability require new modes of urban governance. Although the urban poor are increasingly recognized as needing to be part of climate adaptation planning and implementation, many governance arrangements fail to explicitly include them. In order to make climate governance more inclusive, transformative capacity is needed. Drawing on two case studies from different urban contexts in South Africa, this paper explores the nature of inclusive governance between local government and the urban poor and the extent to which this has contributed to transformative development trajectories. The findings suggest that inclusive governance will be strengthened when local government (1) recognizes the everyday reality of the urban poor and works with them to identify priorities for transformative change, (2) supports sustained intermediaries who are urban poor themselves and (3) draws on diverse modes of governance to find new ways to engage diverse actors and experiment with inclusive adaptation planning and practice. These practices will help to build transformative capacity that can envisage and enable new ways of governing urban risk and implementing adaptation that puts the poor, frequently most impacted by climate and disaster risk, at the centre.

Nature-based solutions (NbSs) are recognised as relevant to spatial planning in addressing societal challenges, although their uptake is limited and fragmented to some case studies, and difficulties emerge from their implementation and operationalisation. The research developed a literature review to investigate how NbS has been considered for its implementation and operationalisation in spatial planning and how NbS has been included across different policy instruments and used to address climate change adaptation (CCA). The results highlighted: Firstly, the review contributed to bridge the gap in NbS implementation and operationalisation by proposing a novel three-dimensional categorisation system to guide the selection of suitable NbS principles to address societal challenges; secondly, this study still revealed gaps in some policy areas, despite the effort to extensively apply NbS across diverse policy instruments to CCA. Overall, the review further emphasises the need for future research focused on monitoring and evaluating NbS's effectiveness to CCA.

Inclusive, co‐created strategies are crucial for climate adaptation in vulnerable communities, as they empower local stakeholders to actively participate in decision‐making, tailoring responses to specific needs. However, tools that facilitate this collaborative approach are scarce and often inaccessible to under‐resourced groups. This article introduces help Them help Themselves (hThT), a web‐based tool designed for transformative community‐based climate change adaptation (TCbA), which enhances co‐creation in adaptation planning. Derived through a combined literature review and key informant interviews, hThT integrates local climate data to offer community‐specific, actionable adaptation recommendations. A novel voting feature within the tool allows community members to evaluate proposed measures directly via mobile devices, ensuring broader participation—particularly among women and marginalised groups, who are often restricted by socio‐cultural norms and existing power relations. Further, hThT incorporates a reflexive questionnaire that supports facilitators in maintaining inclusive, transparent, and accountable adaptation processes, offering a structured approach to co‐creation. Serving as a boundary object, hThT enables shared understanding and collaborative decision‐making across diverse groups, bridging governance gaps that commonly impede adaptive planning. Leveraging advances in ICT, hThT aims to enhance the accessibility and usability of climate information, fostering representative decision‐making in adaptation planning. By embedding hThT into broader adaptation frameworks, these efforts become more effective and scalable across varied communities, offering a realistic, participatory model for adapting to the uncertainties of climate change.

Climate change adaptation planning requires the integration of disciplines, stakeholders, different modelling approaches, treatment options, and scales of analysis. An integrated stepwise planning approach is a critical requirement for effective climate change adaptation in the context of small island developing states and coastal communities. To address this need, this paper reports on a systematic review of 116 research papers from an initial set of around 650 academic peer-reviewed papers. These papers were assessed and categorised based on their planning framework or the approach utilised, measured climate change impacts, employed methods and tools, and recommended adaptation strategies or options. This study identified three important dimensions of a fully integrated climate change adaptation planning process, namely, integration in assessment, integration in modelling, and integration in adaptive responses. Moreover, it resulted in the formulation of a novel multi-layered integrative climate change adaptation planning approach. Adopting this holistic and integrative approach is more likely to yield better climate change adaptation in planning outcomes over the long term.

The impacts of climate change due to more frequent and intense storms, fires, and floods are felt most acutely at the community scale, and local adaptation policy and planning is critically important. However, local practitioners face many barriers that can undermine their capacity to adopt and sustain adaptation initiatives to reduce exposure and vulnerability and strengthen resilience to climate risks. Existing scholarship suggests that national governments play an important role in providing leadership and resources to support local adaptation policy development. However, less research attention has been devoted to investigating sub-national, regional government initiatives to support local adaptation policy and planning in federal states, despite their financial resources and constitutional responsibility to oversee municipalities. This article analyzes how one sub-national government, the provincial government of Nova Scotia (Canada), activated and motivated local adaptation policy and planning through a combination of policy instruments and municipally focused capacity-building initiatives. In addition to describing the structure and dynamics of the provincial mandate for municipal adaptation planning in Nova Scotia, we provide case study evidence to draw insights about the enabling conditions for the successful implementation of climate change adaptation governance initiatives of this kind.

Climate change has been conceptualized as a form and a product of colonization. In this perspective, it becomes important to base climate change adaptation and transformation efforts on decolonizing practices and imaginaries. A central aspect of decolonization is contained in the Indigenous conceptualization of relationality. Exploring how decolonization and relationality might form the foundation for transformations research, we engage with the concept of ‘right relations’. In the context of this inquiry, we take ‘right relations’ to mean an obligation to live up to the responsibilities involved when taking part in a relationship—be it to other humans, other species, the land or the climate. We begin the paper by bringing together the literature on climate change adaptation, transformation and decolonization to show their interconnections and emphasize the need to engage with all three when talking about sustainability. Second, we invoke the idea of ‘right relations’ to address how non-Indigenous transformation researchers can further the process of decolonization as part of their research. Third, we offer insights from our own research experience with narrative practices to help exemplify how transformation researchers in all disciplines might embody ‘right relations’ centered around four characteristics: listening deeply, self-reflexivity, creating space and being in action. Embodying ‘right relations’ is a continuous process of becoming with no end point, and we do not wish to suggest that we hold the answers. Instead, we reflect on our role in this process and hope for these words to open a dialogue about how we might move towards a ‘decolonized humanity’. We suggest that willingness to be affected and altered by the process of reciprocal collaborations is key to imagining decolonial ways of being and that this in turn can be a powerful manner of generating equitable and sustainable transformations.

One of the most evident effects of the cities expansions is the increasing urban temperatures, the so-called urban heat islands, affecting more significantly vulnerable populations. In this study, we examine heat vulnerability in Arica, a medium-sized coastal and desert city in Chile, using the Heat Vulnerability Index (HVI) methodology. We compared the performance of two methodological approaches: Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Equal Weight (EW), as well as how this vulnerability is distributed among local climate zones. The results show that the general spatial pattern of heat vulnerability indices is moderately heterogeneous in the city. The PCA method grouped all indicators into four independent components that explain 71.7% of the total variance. Specifically, the PCA method overestimated vulnerability in the urban core of the city as well as in Cancha Rayada sector, while the EW method overestimated it in peripheral areas due to inherent differences in how each method weighs and processes spatial data. Regarding vulnerability to heat in the local climatic zones (LCZ) of Arica, both methods agreed that the Lightweight lowrise represents the class with the highest levels of vulnerability, notably in areas such as Cancha Rayada and Pedro Blanquier, the districts most susceptible to extreme heat. This study may help to provide results for future research, as well as to carry on adaptation and mitigation strategies for urban planning in Arica, in a context of implementation of the climate change adaptation and mitigation plans in Chile and the necessary actions at the urban level.

Abstract Climate change is challenging the conventional approaches for water systems planning. Two main approaches are commonly implemented in the design of climate change adaptation plans: impact-oriented top-down approaches and vulnerability-oriented bottom-up approaches. In order to overcome the shortcomings of both approaches and take advantage of their strengths, we propose an integrative methodology to define adaptation strategies at basin scale, identifying and combining potential changes in water demand and water supply infrastructure along with climate variability and change. The impact of climate change on future local water availability is assessed applying a top-down approach. Local knowledge is used through a participatory bottom-up approach to foresee future scenarios of evolution of the agricultural sector and agricultural water demand, and to identify locally relevant adaptation strategies. A hydroeconomic model integrates the information from both approaches to identify a socially acceptable and cost-effective program of measures for each climate scenario. This method was applied to the Jucar basin, a highly regulated basin with a tight equilibrium between water resources and demands. The results show an important variability of climate change impacts across the basin, with main inflow reductions in the headwaters. The stakeholders prioritized the adaptation options of change to drip irrigation, use of non-conventional resources, and changes in water governance. The results obtained from the hydroeconomic model show that the portfolio of selected adaptation measures could significantly reduce the system’s average annual deficit and cost.