Despite the widespread acknowledgement of the mistakes that have been made in allowing development in dangerous coastal zones, communities impacted by destructive tropical cyclones repeatedly choose to rebuild. Sea level rise and climate change has increased the need for a new paradigm, but this outcome continues to persist, partly because property owners and communities do have many other options. Although retreating from the shore is considered one of the most effective means to manage this risk (Alexander et al 2011), retreat is politically challenging and often cost-prohibitive, since governments are prohibited from regulatory and actual expropriation without compensation.

In this paper we conduct a comparative study of the practice of coastal retreat as climate adaptation in the United States, Australia, and New Zealand using case studies such as those from New York’s post-superstorm-Sandy buyout program, Cape Cod, Mass. de-development program; Byron Bay, Australia (Leitch, 2009), which has repealed a zoning system with retreat clauses; and the Kapati Coast in New Zealand.

We take the view that retreat is not an “all or nothing” strategy, and that de-intensifying coastal development is a legitimate means of retreating. We furthermore focus on the potential for temporary structures to provide a balanced strategy of economic use of coastal lands and as a way to increase adaptive capacity. The adoption of temporary strategies, open public markets, mobile businesses, and trailers have a critical role to play in coastal resilience and have been heralded by some as a manifestation of a more dynamic, flexible and adaptive urbanism (Bishop & Williams, 2012). Yet, they are generally prohibited by floodplain regulations.

Clearly, climate change adaptation solutions that provide value to landowners and simultaneously lead to land uses that are more resilient to storms and sea level rise is within the public interest of communities, yet many innovative solutions that might work are present illegal or politically impractical. It is imperative that solutions to these challenges be found for long-term resilience and sustainability of coastal cities and towns world-wide, and partial retreat and temporary structures have a critical role to play.

The MapUCE (Applied Modeling and Urban Planning Law : Urban Climate & Energy) project, is a French National funded project that started on March 2014 for four years. Its main objective is to integrate quantitative data of urban micro-climate, climate and energy consumption, in urban policies and legal documents with a methodology applicable to all cities in France.

Some scientific goals deal with the production of climate and energy consumption data, for example: How to take inhabitants behavior on energy consumption into account in numerical simulations with TEB model? or how to produce building's energy consumption and UHI or thermal comfort indexes for any city on the territory? To reach the main goal of the project, research on how to integrate energy, micro-climate and climate change issues in urban planning at the right time with the right legal tool should be also addressed in parallel. The work presented here belongs to this second component of the project.

There is a specific task in MAPuCe project that deals with the analysis of “exemplary cases" of climate and energy issues integration in city planning and urban design. The objective, is to analyze the levers that permit the transfer from climatic knowledge to practices. And also, to understand what is the applicable scale of such information and what are the obstacles. In summary, why the transfer of climate information is successfully done in some places and not in others?

At the beginning a large panel of cases were identified in France and abroad (Europe, America, Asia and Oceania) based on scientific and Grey literature as well as some preliminary interviews with researchers. In a second time the focus was put on a panel of cases that seemed us particularly interesting: Germany and Japan due to their high degree of expertise at both research and implementation levels; Spain and Netherlands due to an incipient practice in this sense. In France the cities of Paris, Grenoble, Lyon, Marseille, Frontignan and Agen were also deeply analyzed.

Methodologically, the analysis was based on literature, institutional websites and interviews with both practitioners and producers of climatic data, almost always researchers. Three types of targets were considered: implementation at the urban politics level trough planning documents, implementation at the operational level (operations of urban spaces) and the development of dedicated agencies and transfer tools (climatic maps or atlas).

This work was done in coordination with the urban environmental lawyers team that analyzed for the same study cases the legal framework at the national, regional and local levels.

Urban ecosystem provides varieties of services. While urban poor get numerous benefits from many of these services, they are affected by disservices as well. Although enormous growth of literature on roles of urban ecosystem services are observed, yet little is known about the factors that motivate urban poor to adapt to urban ecosystem services and disservices. This study is aimed to attain twofold objectives. First to identify range of urban ecosystem services and disservices which the urban poor take into account to ensure their wellbeing. Second to examine the factors that motivate poor people to (a) take advantages of urban ecosystem services and (b) cope against ecosystem disservices.

This study is conducted in coastal Khulna, a metropolis exposed to climatic disasters. A total of 235 families selected randomly from Rupsha slum were interviewed through administering a semi structured questionnaire. From a list of 25 ecosystem services and disservices, respondents were asked to rate in a 5-point Likert scale (very low =1 to very high = 5) if they get benefit/affected from a particular ecosystem service. By employing Principal Component Analysis (PCA) their responses against these 25 categories are bought down to four practical utilities/negative utilities. These four categories are related to (a) livelihood, (b) comfort, (c) security and (d) recreation. Four indexes are developed and each index is used as a dependent variable in multiple regression model to examine the factors that influence poor people’s access to ecosystem services and disservice for livelihood, comfort, security and recreation. Earlier, respondents who claimed to derive low benefits from a particular ecosystem services were asked if they are really motivated to derive higher benefits in the future. Their responses were binary coded, i.e. yes or no. Finally, to identify the motivating factors and to measure the extent of influence of those factors, a logistic regression model is employed. Here the dependent variable is “if respondents are really motivated to derive higher benefits from ecosystem services”. As independent variables, in addition to variables that are identified in Personal Motivation Theory (PMT) (such as intrinsic benefits, extrinsic benefits, perceived severity, perceived vulnerability), variables related to socio-economic, demographic, behavioural, spatial and governance related aspects are employed in the Binary Logistic model.

Result shows that urban poor respondents are benefited from both green and blue ecosystem services. Green ecosystem services include making using of parks, streetscapes, urban forests, playgrounds as source of livelihood, comfort, and recreation. Similarly, the blue ecosystem services includes rivers, canals, urban swamps, natural drainage and artificially developed waterfronts. Ecosystem disservices include, waterlogging, storm water overflows, surface run off and smell from decomposed waste in natural drainage. Standardized beta values of Multiple Regression analysis show that access to ecosystem service related to livelihood are mostly affected by socio-economic and demographic variables while access to comfort and recreation related services are determined by resource governance related and spatial factors. Finally, the Binomial Logistic Regression analysis unveils that motivation to enhance access to recreation related ecosystem services are significantly determined by gender, family income, distance from house, access fees etc. On the other hand motivation to enhance access to livelihood related ecosystem services are significantly determined by level of education, fear for eviction, tenure of housing, length of stay in the city, perception about intrinsic benefit. On the contrary access to ecosystem disservices that relate to comfort and security are determined by risk perception, season of a year, tenure of housing, fear of eviction, and past adaptation behaviour. However, other factors such as occupation, age, access to information do not have significant influence in this respect. The policy implication of the findings is, this would help designing separate sets of intervention for enhancing urban poor’s access to both green and blue urban ecosystem services for better livelihood, security and comfort particularly in the changing context of climate. Therefore, this finding would give synergies to ongoing efforts of building resilient city in an urbanizing world.

One of the best-known effects of urbanization on the local climate is urban warming or what is more commonly known as the urban heat island (UHI). The UHI can lead to unpleasant effects on urban dwellers not least of all on air quality, energy consumption levels, human health, and even mortality rates. In Beirut, haphazard urbanization trends coupled with the relative high density of over 400 inhabitants per square kilometer, are leading to serious implications on the UHI. A study published by one of the leading academic institutions in the city, the American University of Beirut (AUB), has shown a strong positive correlation between increasing populations in the city and heat-related deaths. The serious implications on the urban climate and accordingly human health arising from the uncontrolled urbanization trends are not being studied in depth nor are they being communicated to the relevant parties that can make an impact in mitigating or correcting these trends. This paper studies the results of the UHI simulations carried out for the Beirut context using the Town Energy Balance model and proposes several scenarios for mitigation of the effects of UHI as such. It also proposes some suggestions for transfer of this urban climatic knowledge to the urban planning and environmental sectors while considering the many limitations in the administrative frameworks and information on the urban climatic discipline as such.

Key words: Beirut, UHI, Town Energy Balance Model, Urban Planning, Climate Knowledge

To answer the climate change challenge, all states have to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, but also to adopt adaptation measures to limit the negative impacts of global warming on the population, the economy and the environment. The question arises especially for cities.

Because of complex interactions between climate change, the evolution of cities and its inhabitants, studying adaptation strategies for cities requires a strong interdisciplinary approach: urban planners, architects, meteorologists, building engineers, economists, social sciences.

Our four-step methodology consists firstly of defining interdisciplinary scenarios at several scales influencing the city evolution; secondly of simulating long term city evolution based on socio-economic and land-use models; thirdly of calculating impacts with physical models, and finally of calculating the indicators quantifying the adaptation strategies.

Interdisciplinary systemic modelling performs well to evaluate several adaptation strategies for a very broad range of topics. Some of the results obtained for the agglomeration of Paris through our interdisciplinary research projects VURCA and MUSCADE will be discussed:

A finding is that Urban planning strategies may have unexpected influence on city expansion when considered on the very long term of the climate change. Another is that the combine effect of global warming and UHI can lead in the future to larger energy consumption in summer than in winter.

Indeed, air-conditioning will probably be necessary in 2100, because of expected stronger, and longer, heat waves. Limiting the UHI intensity allows for energy savings, and hence contributes to climate change mitigation. Adaptation strategies exist to limit air-conditioning use, both in time and intensity.

Analysis of several vegetation strategies, at several spatial and planning scales (from agricultural practices in the city surroundings to urban trees and green-roofs) have been performed and evaluated. Architectural choices also allow to reduce the UHI. Finally, inhabitants' use and practices seem to be an efficient lever to reduce energy consumption in buildings and its impact on the urban climate.