CityAdapt’s various implementation activities are carried out with demonstration sites to showcase benefits to surrounding populations and inspire replication. This includes demonstration sites for edible mushroom cultivation, urban gardens, roof rainwater harvesting systems, beekeeping, water infiltration systems, agroforestry, and other activities.
CityAdapt also emphasizes learning from project activities, especially for planning officials and communities to take ownership and help them continue after project end. It has therefore produced or is producing an array of knowledge products, including manuals, policy briefs, case studies, technical guidelines, and education material for children. A key aspect of this work has been highlighting NbS’ cost-effectiveness in comparison to conventional solutions (see story maps).
One key is a virtual class with 45 students that work on adaptation-related issues in their respective 17 countries. All the students reported an across-the-board improvement in their knowledge of NbS for urban adaptation. This class model will now be expanded to other regions. These learning components help to build the case for further NbS integration in urban planning and policy while spreading CityAdapt’s lessons to other actors interested in using NbS for their respective cities.
Key factors for this building block’s success are the baseline established by the vulnerability assessment, and the ongoing participation in activities by local communities.
Academic institutions with a local presence must be involved in the project, for example via master’s students’ thesis research. The academic institutions and their students need real-world projects for applied learning, and the adaptation activities need someone to carry on with monitoring and evaluation. This helps to ensure project sustainability and the continuity of project implementation and essential M&E tools. At the same time, local participation in monitoring (also referred to as citizen science in many contexts) is key for buy-in and ownership of activities, in addition to collecting useful data. School activities have been highly advantageous for generating local interest in project activities, as children take lessons learned home to share with their families. The pandemic has represented a major challenge to this effort, but the project has adapted, and created virtual educational games for children to play at home with their parents and teachers.
Building block 2: Nature-based Solutions for Adaptation via Sustainable Livelihoods and Green Infrastructure
Edible flat mushrooms produced in the peri-urban area of Xalapa
CityAdapt
Coffee plantations in peri-urban area of San Salvador restored with oak trees
CityAdapt
The Nature-based Solutions themselves are a core building block of the project. These solutions include reforestation, riparian restoration and infiltration trenches, the establishment of lineal, permeable trails for improved watershed functioning to reduce the risk of flooding and landslides during heavy rains, and water scarcity during dry periods. The tangible co-benefit of these measures is the reduction of disaster risk and easier access to water supplies, to name just two.
An integral part of these Nature-based Solutions is the creation of sustainable livelihoods that take pressure off ecosystems, including edible mushroom cultivation, beekeeping, urban agroforestry and gardening. The presence of these activities not only helps with decreasing pressure on ecosystems but also creating buy-in on the part of communities; they see a tangible economic benefit from the project and thus have a vested interest in its success. For example, mushroom cultivation has led to an additional source of income of $152 USD per month per plot for Xalapa households.
The inclusion of key community and government stakeholders is crucial for this building block’s success, in addition to the physical space and coordination among differing agency mandates needed to implement NbS on a scale that will lead to tangible benefits.
Identifying “hotspots,” or the most vulnerable areas of the community to implement NbS has been crucial to make the largest, and most visible, impact possible to prove the effectiveness of such solutions to the community. The project’s watershed perspective has also been critical for success, as it captures the ecosystem services (water infiltration) even when they extend beyond municipal limits to other jurisdictions. Community involvement is key to help avoid “maladaptation” or livelihood activities that will not be useful to communities or even add to existing problems (for example, crops that are not suited to a region’s soils), especially if there is a lack of interest or buy-in to continue them after the project has ended. Fruit trees and community gardens, for example, have proved to be successful sources of alternative livelihoods for different members of the community while helping to stabilize soils and regulate water flows. Co-benefits from livelihood creation and reduced damages from disasters are crucial for community and government buy-in and integration of NbS in future planning processes.
Building block 1: Gender-differentiated vulnerability assessment
Participatory process for vulnerability assessment
CityAdapt
This vulnerability assessment methodology allows for the accurate targeting of nature-based solutions to critical areas of need in cities and sectors of the population. It specifically includes a gender focus to ensure that adaptation efforts take into account how climate change affects women differently than men, given their varying roles in society. The vulnerability studies allow identifying the areas of greatest danger from weather-related events (such as landslides, floods, etc.) based on the exposure, sensitivity and adaptive capacity of the analyzed territory. They are carried out through participatory processes with communities and key stakeholders and climatic scenarios that integrate climatic, environmental and socioeconomic variables at the same time. The analysis also allows estimating the risk of loss of ecosystem services and therefore the potential needs for adaptation to climate change. This exercise is the basis for designing and implementing nature-based solutions to strengthen the resilience of communities in urban and peri-urban systems. Finally, this process builds a sense of co-ownership and relationships for partnerships to carry out the project.
One of the main conditions needed for this building block’s success is the inclusion and approval of local communities and key stakeholders within those communities and their respective governments. Additionally, strong sources of climate and hydrological data facilitate this analysis process greatly.
A key aspect of this block is access to data. For example, Mexico has abundant meteorological and hydrological data while El Salvador does not. This allowed for a much more thorough climate change scenario in the former case. In terms of the consultation process, capturing perceived risk, in addition to modeled risks, is key for developing targeted activities where they are most needed. In that process, including women through the gender-differentiated approach also contributes to better targeted adaptation efforts by successfully identifying socially vulnerable populations. During this vulnerability assessment, capacity building is essential to ensure that communities and policy makers can interpret and use the assessments subsequently.
