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Supporting Urban Climate Adaptation Governance Through Citizen Sensing

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Sustainable Policies and Practices in Energy, Environment and Health Research

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Abstract

Cities are particularly exposed to risks arising from climate change, and therefore have to adapt continuously to changing conditions that affect citizens’ health and wellbeing. As the community level is where climate change impacts are most experienced, successful adaptation necessarily implies the broad support of affected communities, including the active involvement of citizens in assessing and responding to climate risks. Yet, many studies have confirmed that urban climate adaptation is in its early stages. Several obstacles have been found to hinder the successful governance of climate adaptation in cities, including the limited availability of site-specific information with high spatial and temporal resolution to support decision-making processes, lack of citizen engagement, and difficulties in communication between individuals and institutions. This chapter explores how an approach based on citizen sensing (CS), defined as citizens acting as sensors to collect and send information using e.g. mobile devices or participatory online platforms, can help to overcome these issues and contribute to the governance of urban climate adaptation. Drawing from the experience of the European research project Citizen Sensing, which has further developed the CS approach by proposing a digital two-way communication system between citizens and relevant institutions, we discuss how and to what extent CS can increase engagement by citizens, while enhancing the preparedness of authorities for taking effective risk management actions and strengthening communication to increase urban climate resilience.

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Acknowledgements

This research is part of the project ‘Citizen Sensing–Urban Climate Resilience through Participatory Risk Management Systems’. Citizen Sensing is part of ERA4CS, an ERA-NET initiated by JPI Climate, and funded by FORMAS (Sweden, Grant no. 2017-01719), FCT (Portugal, Grant no. ERA4CS/0001/2016), RCN (Norway), NWO (The Netherlands) with co-funding by the European Union (Grant 690462).

This work was financially supported by ERA4CS/0001/2016—Citizen Sensing—Urban 419 Climate Resilience through a Participatory Risk Management System (CitiSense), funded by FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia I.P.

Marisa Graça was financially supported as a post-doc researcher at CITTA/FEUP by ERA4CS/0001/2016—Citizen Sensing—Urban 419 Climate Resilience through a Participatory Risk Management System (CitiSense), funded by FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia I.P.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Faculty of Engineering, Research Centre for Territory, Transports and Environment (CITTA), University of Porto, Rua Dr. Roberto Frias, s/n, 4200-465, Porto, Portugal

    Marisa Graça & Sara Cruz

  2. Department of Thematic Studies—Environmental Change, Centre for Climate Science and Policy Research, Linköping University, 581 83, Linköping, Sweden

    Tina-Simone Neset & Sirkku Juhola

  3. Ecosystems and Environment Research Programme, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland

    Sirkku Juhola

Authors
  1. Marisa Graça
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  2. Tina-Simone Neset
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  3. Sirkku Juhola
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  4. Sara Cruz
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Marisa Graça .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Hamburg, Germany

    Walter Leal Filho

  2. UFP Energy, Environment and Health Research Unit, Fernando Pessoa University, Porto, Portugal

    Diogo Guedes Vidal

  3. UFP Energy, Environment and Health Research Unit, Fernando Pessoa University, Porto, Portugal

    Maria Alzira Pimenta Dinis

  4. Centre for Public Administration and Public Policies, Institute of Social and Political Sciences, University of Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal

    Ricardo Cunha Dias

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Graça, M., Neset, TS., Juhola, S., Cruz, S. (2022). Supporting Urban Climate Adaptation Governance Through Citizen Sensing. In: Leal Filho, W., Vidal, D.G., Dinis, M.A.P., Dias, R.C. (eds) Sustainable Policies and Practices in Energy, Environment and Health Research. World Sustainability Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86304-3_11

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