Searching for Urban Content in Climate Change Adaptation Policies. A Comparative Review of National Adaptation Plans for Climate Change in the Global South

By 2050, people in urbanised areas will account for 68% of the world's population, 80% of which will be concentrated in Asia and Africa. The “planetary urbanisation”, theorised by Brenner and Schmid in 2011, will be intensified by the increasing and frequently occurring effects of climate change, such as flooding, droughts, rising temperatures, seawater's acidification, and so forth. Decisive action is urgently needed to reduce the climate change impacts on population, ecosystems and economic development in the future decades. The theoretical concept underpinning this master thesis is urban climate resilience developed in its main three components: (i) urban system; (ii) climate change; and (iii) resilience. Therefore, urban climate resilience is understood as the guiding principle to promote enabling environment to facilitate the mainstreaming of climate change adaptation in the planning process overcoming the Disaster Risk Reduction (DDR) approach. In this view, mainstreaming adaptation to climate change is a crucial and desired point of arrival to operationalise resilience planning. To demonstrate how to turn urban climate resilience into practice, this research analysed the National Adaptation Plans (NAPs), as established by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) under the Cancun Adaptation Framework (CAF) in 2011. This dissertation conducted a comparative analysis of the urban content of the 20 NAPs officially submitted by the Global South countries to the NAP Central of UNFCCC. This research applied the methodology used for reviewing the urban content of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) developed by Mayr et al. (2017) for UN-Habitat. This analysis consisted of recognising adaptation challenges and the appropriate adaptation measures in the general structure of the NAPs, focusing on urban systems and human settlements. Moreover, this thesis addressed the relationships among the urban content of the NAPs, the NDCs, and National Urban Policies (NUP) of the analysed Global South countries. To carry out the analysis, a matrix composed of 172 indicators was produced and filled with the data searched within the 20 NAPs, the NDCs and NUPs. Following the NDCs’ methodology, the indicators were grouped into nine indices as follows: (i) Geographic Indicators; (ii) General Indicators (socio-economic); (iii) NDCs Urban Indicators; (iv) NAPs Generic Indicators; (v) NAPs Urban Indicators; (vi) Urban content in National Policies and Plans Indicators; (vii) International policy/strategy/reports linages; (viii) National plans/policy/strategies/reports linkages; and (ix) NUPs Indicators. The main result of the analysis is a lack of urban content in climate change adaptation policies. Starting from the key findings derived from the matrix, this thesis aims to define two broad recommendations for implementing the urban content into climate change adaptation policies through spatial planning at the local level focusing on a multiscalar approach.