A methodological framework to assess the urban content in climate change policies [Valutare il contenuto urbano nelle politiche di adattamento al cambiamento climatico: una proposta metodologica]

By 2050, people in urbanized areas will account for 68% of the world’s population, 80% of which will be concentrated in Asia and Africa. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) introduced in 2011 the National Adaptation Plan (NAP) under the Cancun Adaptation Framework (CAF). Countries of the non-Annex I, described by the UN-General Assembly as especially vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, are invited to develop NAPs to identify adaptation challenges and devise appropriate climate adaptation responses. Recognizing the increasing vulnerability of urban systems to the effects of climate change, in 2019, UN-Habitat defined the supplement of the NAP process’s technical guidelines for addressing urban and human settlement issues in NAPs. This paper aims to propose a methodology to assess the urban content of the NAPs after ten years from that the CAF comes into force. The evaluation is based, adapting and expanding, on the methodology used to assess the urban content of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) published by UN-Habitat in 2017. The methodology aims to analyse both key adaptation challenges and responses explicitly or implicitly related to urban systems. Moreover, it aims at understanding the interlinkage of urban content in NAP in relation to other key policies, such as NDCs and National Urban Policies (NUPs). In this perspective, 172 indicators were selected and clustered into nine groups: (i) Geographic Indicators; (ii) General Indicators; (iii) NAPs General Indicators; (iv) NAPs Urban Indicators; (v) NDCs Indicators; (vi) NUPs Indicators; (vii) Urban content in National Policies Indicators; (viii) International policy linkages (including SDGs, Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, Paris Agreement and New Urban agenda); (ix) National plans/policy/strategies/reports linkages. The methodology was tested on Brazil’s NAP, trying to find general considerations to apply to the countries that officially submitted their NAPs between 2014 to 2020. The test showed that: there is a stronger focus on defining climate adaptation challenges more than responses; climate adaptation challenges and responses are predominantly identified at the national scale, with a focus on policies and strategies at the national level; among the Brazilian NAP, there is “cities strategy”, and it means that the NAP has a high urban content. In conclusion, the paper will highlight critical issues and improvements for each of the nine indices analysed.