Abstract
Recently, considerable focus, e.g., in the fifth IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Assessment Report (2014) has been trained on why adaptation and mitigation have not been developed more than at present, with relatively few local government actions taken compared with, for example, more discursive policy agreement on the importance of the issue of climate change. Going beyond a focus on general limits and barriers, this comment suggests that one important issue is that climate change has not yet been sufficiently integrated into the state regulative structure of legislation and policy-making. A comparison between three cases suggests that local developments that are not supported in particular by binding regulation are unlikely to achieve the same general level of implementation as issues for which such regulative demands (and thereby also requirements for prioritization) exist. This constitutes an important consideration for the development of adaptation and mitigation as policy areas, including on the local level.
Highlights
The impacts of climate change are likely to affect all sectors of society and the natural world
The way in which this climate risk is realized depends on how individuals, societal sectors or ecosystems are exposed to hazards and how vulnerable they are. Both adaptation and mitigation have emerged into an arena of environmental regulation, where related issues, i.e., energy policy, have been addressed in the last three decades with increasing numbers of measures
Given that climate change has been emphasized as an area of broad societal risk, we highlight a need to develop approaches to integrate the emerging area of adaptation within a structure of mandatory regulation
Summary
While increasing focus is placed on policy development in relation to climate change, it is yet unclear as to how successful or efficient these efforts developed so far are in terms of tackling climate change, both mitigation and adaptation. The social complexity of implementation and gaining political will for the development in the face of multiple stressors may be regarded as limiting progress towards managing climate change [2,3,4] This limitation means that there is a need to problematize the structure of implementation further. The way in which this climate risk is realized depends on how individuals, societal sectors or ecosystems are exposed to hazards and how vulnerable they are Both adaptation and mitigation have emerged into an arena of environmental regulation, where related issues, i.e., energy policy, have been addressed in the last three decades with increasing numbers of measures. If climate change policy is a crucial consideration in public policy, is it enough that it (in particular on the adaptation side) has mainly been instituted through non-binding measures?
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