Demographic differences in Australia's local government adaptation planning for health and climate change.

Subaltern forms of knowledge are required to boost local adaptation

Almost 700 people died from heat-related stress during the catastrophic 1995 heat wave in Chicago, Illinois.1 The three-day weather event saw 24-hour mean average temperatures of 87.2°F; the heat reached triple digits on two days, and there was little relief at night.2 Many people succumbed to heart attack and dehydration, while others collapsed during severe episodes of existing respiratory conditions.3 The death toll in the summer of 1995 gave Chicagoans a clear picture of how a surge in hot weather can affect human health. A decade later, Mayor Richard Daley launched an extensive program that brought together city agencies, academics, and scientists to develop a Climate Change Action Plan to help reduce the city’s contribution to climate change.4 Much of the plan focuses on sustainable mitigation actions such as planting trees and training workers to install renewable energy technologies. Within that plan, however, is a climate change adaptation strategy with a goal of preparing the city and its residents for future unusual weather events associated with climate change.5 Chicago is one of several large cities with climate action plans in place—others include New York City, San Francisco, Sydney, and Mexico City.6 Like Chicago’s, these plans promote mitigation and sustainability. Much of the adaptation portion of these initiatives is aimed at the built environment—buildings, highways, and facilities. But officials in these cities are beginning to talk about the public health cobenefits from their action plans, and public health advocates are speaking up and pushing for programs designed to prepare for or prevent climate-sensitive disease and illness.

Climate change is the most urgent and significant public health risk facing the globe. In Australia, it has been identified that Environmental Health Officers/Practitioners (EHOs/EHPs, hereafter EHOs) are a currently underutilized source of knowledge and skills that can contribute to climate change adaptation planning at the local government level. The ability of local government EHOs to utilize their local knowledge and skills in human health risk assessment during a public health emergency was demonstrated through their role in the response to COVID-19. This study used a survey and follow up interviews to examine the roles and responsibilities of EHOs during the COVID-19 pandemic and used the results to examine the potential of the workforce to tackle climate change and health related issues. What worked well, what regulatory tools were helpful, how interagency collaboration worked and what barriers or hindering factors existed were also explored. A workforce review of EHOs in South Australia was also undertaken to identify current and future challenges facing EHOs and their capacity to assist in climate change preparedness. The findings demonstrated that the workforce was used in the response to COVID-19 for varying roles by councils, including in education and communication (both internally and externally) as well as monitoring and reporting compliance with directions. Notably, half the workforce believed they could have been better utilized, and the other half thought they were well utilized. The South Australian Local Government Functional Support Group (LGFSG) was praised by the workforce for a successful approach in coordinating multiagency responses and communicating directions in a timely fashion. These lessons learnt from the COVID-19 pandemic should be incorporated into climate change adaptation planning. To ensure consistent messaging and a consolidated information repository, a centralized group should be used to coordinate local government climate change adaptation plans in relation to environmental health and be included in all future emergency management response plans. The surveyed EHOs identified environmental health issues associated with climate change as the most significant future challenge; however, concerningly, participants believe that a lack of adequate resourcing, leading to workforce shortages, increasing workloads and a lack of support, is negatively impacting the workforce's preparedness to deal with these emerging issues. It was suggested that the misperception of environmental health and a failure to recognize its value has resulted in a unique dilemma where EHOs and their councils find themselves caught between managing current workload demands and issues, and endeavouring to prepare, as a priority, for emerging environmental health issues associated with climate change and insufficient resources.

Introduction to <i>Climate Change Adaptation in New York City: Building a Risk Management Response</i>

Equity in human adaptation-related responses: A systematic global review

The aim of this study is to assess the extent to which scientific information has been used to inform climate change adaptation policies, plans and strategies in Kenya; and also to assess the effectiveness of existing platforms for sharing climate change information in the country. Two major policy documents guiding climate change adaptation planning in Kenya, the National Climate Change Response Strategy (NCCRS) and the National Climate Change Action Plan (NCCAP), were analysed for use of scientific information in their formulation through literature review; and interviewing policy makers using an open-ended questionnaire to determine the extent to which they accessed and applied scientific-based evidence of climate change impacts in development planning. Both documents, the NCCRS and NCCAP, made fairly good use of evidence contained in technical reports, especially the UNFCC, World Bank and FAO reports. However, they made very minimal, less than 20 %, reference to the hard scientific facts offered by journals, books and workshop proceedings. Similarly, only about 6 % of the respondents used the climate change information to develop mitigation and adaptation plans, training curricula, and Research and Development programs. The rest, over 76 %, rarely used it for planning purposes. This could be attributed to limited knowledge of appropriate methodology to distil relevant decision-relevant information from the spectrum of available information on climate change projections, availability of the information in user-unfriendly formats, and lack of information sharing protocols. There is need to reverse this trend. Most respondents (42 %) preferred the agricultural extension system in delivering climate change information. This was followed by stakeholders meetings with 29 % of the respondents’ preference, conferences and workshops with 5 %, media (4 %), and climate change networks and internet with less than 1 % each. However, the national agricultural system is severely constrained by staff and facilities, and is therefore very limited in its reach. There is therefore need to strengthen it and also take full advantage of recent advances in ICT if the war against climate change is to be won. Meanwhile, majority of the respondents (50 %) were ignorant of the existence of any climate change databases. But about 17 % of the respondents were aware of and accessed databases hosted by Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) and other international research centres. Another 10 % of the respondents relied on databases managed by donor agencies whilst about 8 % of the respondents each accessed databases established by Government Departments and National Agricultural Research Institutions (NARIs). Finally, about 7 % of the respondents relied solely on the FAO-based databases. The preference by respondents for databases managed by CGIAR centres may be attributed to the richness and accessibility of these databases due to very active participation of these centres in climate change research. There is need to enrich NARIs databases and those of Government Departments and make them more accessible to enhance sharing and application of climate change information by policy makers and other stakeholders.

Local governments are at the forefront of climate change adaptation planning. Although there is significant research on adaptation planning processes, there is scant empirical evidence of how local governments are completing the adaptation planning cycle by monitoring or evaluating their efforts. This leads to a fundamental lack of understanding about what actions work, in which contexts, and why? This article explores the practice of monitoring and evaluation of adaptation by local government, drawing on data from a national survey of Australian local governments, enhanced by interviews with selected respondents. It finds that monitoring and evaluation of climate change adaptation is challenging for local governments. Monitoring efforts focus on tracking implementation of actions, and evaluation of adaptation plans and projects is rare. It argues that for effective adaptation planning and learning, greater attention needs to be paid to building evaluative capacity of local governments to complete the adaptation planning cycle.

A Hybrid Modelling Framework for Ecosystem-Based Climate Change Adaptation Using System Dynamics and Bayesian Networks

The MJA-Lancet Countdown on health and climate change in Australia was established in 2017 and produced its first national assessment in 2018 and annual updates in 2019, 2020 and 2021. It examines five broad domains: climate change impacts, exposures and vulnerability; adaptation, planning and resilience for health; mitigation actions and health co-benefits; economics and finance; and public and political engagement. In this, the fifth year of the MJA-Lancet Countdown, we track progress on an extensive suite of indicators across these five domains, accessing and presenting the latest data and further refining and developing our analyses. Within just two years, Australia has experienced two unprecedented national catastrophes - the 2019-2020 summer heatwaves and bushfires and the 2021-2022 torrential rains and flooding. Such events are costing lives and displacing tens of thousands of people. Further, our analysis shows that there are clear signs that Australia's health emergency management capacity substantially decreased in 2021. We find some signs of progress with respect to health and climate change. The states continue to lead the way in health and climate change adaptation planning, with the Victorian plan being published in early 2022. At the national level, we note progress in health and climate change research funding by the National Health and Medical Research Council. We now also see an acceleration in the uptake of electric vehicles and continued uptake of and employment in renewable energy. However, we also find Australia's transition to renewables and zero carbon remains unacceptably slow, and the Australian Government's continuing failure to produce a national climate change and health adaptation plan places the health and lives of Australians at unnecessary risk today, which does not bode well for the future.

Climate change is the greatest global health threat of the 21st century, with numerous direct and indirect human health consequences. Local governments play a critical role in communities' response to climate change, both through strategies to reduce emissions and adaption plans to respond to changing climate and extreme weather events. Australian local government environmental health officers (EHOs) have the relevant skills and expertise to inform and develop adaptation plans for health protection in the context of climate change. This study used an online survey followed by phone interviews of local government management to determine the extent to which EHOs are involved in adaptation planning in health protection climate change plans. Questions were also asked to determine whether local councils are aware of EHOs' capability to contribute and to gauge the willingness of management to provide EHOs with the workload capacity to do so. The findings demonstrated that although climate adaptation and mitigation planning is occurring in local government, it is not including or considering the public health impacts on the community. Primarily, it was found that this oversight was due to a lack of awareness of the health impacts of climate change outside of a disaster or emergency scenario. Currently, EHOs are an untapped source of knowledge and skills that can contribute to climate change adaption planning. To support this, a framework of local environmental health practice was developed to assist the reconceptualization of the scope of practice required for the planning and response to climate change.

Cross-level differences and similarities in coastal climate change adaptation planning

With the adoption of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, adaptation has become more visibly important for responding to the climate crisis. Countries are encouraged to put in place policy measures to implement their National Determined Contributions (NDC) including National Adaptation Plans (NAPs) to address the needs of adaptation across sectors and governance levels. Multi-level learning implies learning across international, national, and local levels of governance and is of particular importance to guide countries’ adaptation planning efforts and to enable them to benefit from the experience and lessons learned obtained at other levels around the world. The objective of this paper is to assess the contribution of multi-level learning to adaptation planning in Latin America by analyzing and comparing learning across levels in three illustrative cases in Latin America: integration of climate change adaptation in watershed planning in Bolivia, ecosystem-based adaptation in Ecuador, and adaptation planning in small-scale agriculture in Honduras. The three research questions formulated cover the learning needs of adaptation planning, the structure and dynamic of the social network that enables multi-level learning nodes, and the strategies adopted by the stakeholders to learn on adaptation planning. In the three cases, adaptation planning functions can be enhanced through changes in multi-level learning nodes and the governance levels involved and through adjustments in the cognitive, normative, and relational dimensions of multi-level learning and the direction of such learning.

Participatory and rapid vulnerability assessments to support adaptation planning in small-scale fishing communities of the Benguela Current Large Marine Ecosystem

Participatory urban planning for climate change adaptation in coastal cities: lessons from a pilot experience in Maputo, Mozambique

The role of the chief scientist (CS), a key administrative position in various Israeli ministries, is to fund policy‐oriented research and support evidence‐based decision‐making. Has the CS's role promoted or constrained incorporation of scientific advice regarding climate change adaptation into governmental policy? Have administrative traditions affected the adaptation planning process in Israel? Analysis of documents and 26 in‐depth interviews with key stakeholders sheds light on the ongoing climate change adaptation policy formulation process. Our study reveals that the CS of the Ministry of Environmental Protection functions as a bridge at different interfaces and can be characterized as a boundary worker between institutions. The inherent independence of this position facilitates the CS's ability to initiate, foster, and prioritize complex issues such as adaptation. Our findings further suggest that the perception that Israel has already adapted, or will easily adapt, has negatively affected the adaptation process. 科学建议和行政传统：首席科学家在气候变化适应工作中的作用 首席科学家是以色列各部门的一个关键行政职务, 其具体作用是为政策性研究提供资金, 并支持循证决策。对于有关气候变化适应的科学建议, 首席科学家的作用是促进还是限制了其被纳入到政府政策中？行政传统是否影响了以色列的气候适应规划进程？通过文件分析及与关键利益相关者的26次深入访谈, 笔者揭示了正在进行的适应气候变化政策的制定过程。研究表明, 环保部门的首席科学家在不同的层面上起着桥梁作用, 在不同机构的分界线上工作以彼此连接。该职位的内在独立性能促进首席科学家在发起问题、培养和优先考虑包括适应气候等复杂问题的能力。研究进一步表明, 以色列已经适应了或即将轻易适应某些观点, 而这已经对气候适应过程产生了负面影响。 Asesoria cientifica y tradiciones administrativas: el papel que juegan los cientificos principales en la adaptacion al cambio climatico El papel que juegan los cientificos principales, un puesto administrativo clave en varios ministerios israelies, esta especificamente designado para el financiamiento de investigacion orientada hacia la politica y el apoyo a decisiones basadas en evidencia. ?El papel que juegan los cientificos principales ha promovido o limitado la incorporacion de asesoria cientifica en lo que concierne a la adaptacion al cambio climatico dentro de las politicas del gobierno? ?Las tradiciones administrativas han afectado el proceso de planeacion para la adaptacion en Israel? El analisis de los documentos en 26 entrevistas exhaustivas con partes afectadas clave ilustra el proceso de formulacion de las politicas de adaptacion al cambio climatico actual. Nuestro estudio revela que el Cientifico Principal del Ministerio de Proteccion Ambiental funciona como un puente para diferentes interfaces y puede ser caracterizado como un trabajador limitrofe entre las instituciones. La independencia inherente de esta posicion facilita la habilidad del cientifico principal para iniciar, fomentar y darle prioridad a complejos problemas como la adaptacion. Nuestros hallazgos sugieren que la percepcion de Israel ya se ha adaptado, o se adaptara facilmente, y ha afectado negativamente el proceso de adaptacion.