Improving Risk Governance for Adapting to Climate Change: Case from Shanghai

Abstract

Decision-making under changing climate has become uncertain and complex, which brings great challenges to traditional risk governance process. Coastal areas in China have been highly urbanized with increasing population and physical assets during the past decades. Based on a simplified risk governance framework, a case of Chinese coastal megacity is evaluated with key functions of risk assessment, risk management, and risk communication. It finds that the case of "Comprehensive Coordination Centre" in Shanghai Fengxian District can play a positive role to improve effectiveness, efficiency, and accountability of risk governance in the Chinese context, especially a potential to reduce "organized irresponsibility" and "systematic risks". Adaptive and integrated risk governance can be improved from policy experiments and experience learnt from implementation. This paper concludes that the innovation in the existing disaster risk reduction system will promote the ability of adaptation to climate change in the long run.