Building Climate Resilience in Coastal City Living Labs Using Ecosystem-Based Adaptation: A Systematic Review

Abstract

Climate change leads to an unequivocal rise in the intensity and frequency of natural disasters. This necessitates mainstreaming of climate adaptation strategies in the global movement on climate action. Ecosystem-Based Adaptation (EBA) has become popular as an effective means of climate adaptation, which can be resilient and flexible compared to hard engineering-based measures. However, ecosystem-based approaches in disaster risk reduction still remain under-researched despite their growing popularity. This study delves into the utility of EBA in the context of the living lab, using a PRISMA (Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses) based Systematic Literature Review. A living lab (LL) is a participatory tool invented to foster innovation through real-life testing environments, such as individual cities. This study focuses on European coastal regions, as these are both highly populated and vulnerable to climate change impacts such as sea-level rise, storms, flooding and erosion. This study identified multiple synergies between the EBA concepts, living lab and disaster-risk reduction and concludes that EBA schemes can be highly effective in the living lab set-up. It also demonstrates that increased stakeholder engagement and the consideration of socio-economic co-benefits as part of the EBA-LL model can lead to successful disaster risk reduction.

Low-Cost Sensors for Monitoring Coastal Climate Hazards: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

“…The detailed checklist along with examples for each checklist is to be found at [ 27 ]. This checklist can be adapted to conduct systematic literature reviews in other fields [ 27 ], as seen from its application in tourism [ 28 , 29 ] and environmental studies [ 30 ]. Furthermore, [ 31 ] defined a systematic literature review protocol exclusively for environmental studies consisting of six steps that the authors named PSALSAR, which stands for protocol, search, appraisal, synthesis, analysis, and results.…”

Harmonizing the Development of Local Socioeconomic Scenarios: A Participatory Downscaling Approach Applied in Five European Case Studies

“…(Oliver et al 2019). However, water scarcity, drought and heat stress are also considered as threats (Ministerie van Infrastructuur en Waterstaat 2020), particularly in the rural areas in the sandy east and south of the Netherlands, where drought is expected to become a problem (van den Eertwegh et al 2019); while extreme rainfall and flooding are expected to occur more frequently. These hazards may affect both rural and urban areas (Ministerie van Infrastructuur en Waterstaat 2020).…”

“…When drafting local-scale socioeconomic scenarios, it is important to not only account for local developments, but also to consider that each case study is embedded in developments at different spatial scales, ranging from global to national, regional, and local levels (van Vuuren et al 2010;van Ruijven et al 2014). Therefore, we select scenarios covering all case study regions as boundary conditions for the local scenarios in a first step.…”

“…We focus on the co-production of local scenario narratives as narratives ease the integration of local stakeholder knowledge into the scenario development process due to their typically non-scientific language (Nilsson et al 2017). The local narratives constitute the basis for producing local-scale projections of key variables that need to be considered in adaptation planning, such as the spatial distribution of population and infrastructure (van Ruijven et al 2014).…”

Harmonizing the Development of Local Socioeconomic Scenarios: A Participatory Downscaling Approach Applied in Four European Case Studies

“…The integration of local knowledge is one important precondition for a successful adaptation process [29]. The project has employed a living lab (LL) approach, which puts the end-user (i.e., local stakeholders) at the center of the development process in order to "co-create" and co-develop new knowledge, products or services [30][31][32][33][34]. The development of locally relevant socioeconomic scenarios is an integral component of such climate services as these scenarios provide the local basis for exploring different adaptation strategies.…”