Abstract
Coastal settlements, home to more than three billion people and growing rapidly, are highly vulnerable to climate change. Increasingly, there are calls for climate adaptation that goes beyond business-as-usual approaches, transforms socioeconomic systems, and addresses underlying drivers of vulnerability. Although calls for transformational adaptation are growing, greater clarity is needed on what transformation means in context in order to bridge the gap between theory and practice. This article reviews the theoretical literature on transformational adaptation, as well as practitioner frameworks and case studies of urban coastal adaptation. The article discusses specific challenges for transformational adaptation and its governance in coastal cities. In doing so, this review contributes to the growing debate about operationalizing the concept of transformational adaptation in the context of coastal cities and offers insights to ensure that transformation processes are inclusive and equitable.
Highlights
The social construction of risk is important in urban contexts [9,10,11,12]
Transformational adaptation is occurring in many sectors and locations, but as this review has demonstrated, the process of transformational adaptation in cities is unique
Geographic, political, and social factors combine to make urban coastal transformational adaptation challenging, but they position coastal cities to be on the forefront of transformational adaptation
Summary
The social construction of risk is important in urban contexts [9,10,11,12]. In Khulna, Bangladesh—ranked one of the top 20 cities in terms of people projected to be exposed to coastal flooding by 2070 [20]—the underlying social and political marginalization of low-income communities and informal settlements has been argued to be the single most important factor contributing to their vulnerability [21]. It is estimated 1 billion people live in informal settlements in developing countries [28], many in coastal zones and flood plains In these places, densities are high, houses are often constructed illegally and without adherence to building codes, and critical infrastructure, including piped water, sanitation, drainage, solid waste collection, and roads are often inadequate or absent, increasing risk [12, 29]. Adaptive capacity: the ability to cope with and respond to the challenges created by climate change
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