Abstract:
As Europe is faced with increasing droughts and
extreme precipitation, countries are taking measures to adapt
to these changes. It is challenging, however, to navigate
through the wide range of possible measures, taking into account
the efficacy, economic impact and social justice aspects
of these measures, as well as the governance requirements
for implementing them. This article presents the approach
of selecting and analysing adaptation measures to increasing
extreme weather events caused by ongoing climate change
that was developed and applied in the H2020 project BINGO
(Bringing Innovation to Ongoing Water Management). The
purpose of this project is (a) to develop an integrated participatory
approach for selecting and evaluating adaptation
measures, (b) to apply and evaluate the approach across
six case-study river basins across Europe, and (c) to support
decision-making towards adaptation capturing the diversity,
the different circumstances and challenges river basins
face across Europe. It combines three analyses: governance,
socio-economic and social justice The governance analysis
focuses on the requirements associated with the measures
and the extent to which these requirements are met at the
research sites. The socio-economic impact focuses on the efficacy
of the measures in reducing the risks and the broad
range of tools available to compare the measures on their societal
impact. Finally, a tentative social justice analysis focuses
on the distributive impacts of the adaptation measures.
In the summary of results, we give an overview of the outcome
of the different analyses. In the conclusion, we briefly
assess the main pros and cons of the different analyses that
were conducted. The main conclusion is that although the research
sites were very different in both the challenges and
the institutional context, the approach presented here yielded
decision-relevant outcomes.
