Risk Inequality and the Food-Energy-Water (FEW) Nexus: A Study of 43 City Adaptation Plans

Abstract

Goals aimed at adapting to climate change in sustainable and just ways are embedded in global agreements such as the Sustainable Development Goals and the New Urban Agenda. However, largely unexamined, are the ways that narrative understandings conveyed in adaptation plans consider and attempt to address inequality in climate risk to urban populations and FEW-systems. In this paper, we examine whether and how adaptation plans from C40 member cities address inequality in risk, by planning actions to reduce hazard exposure or tackling the drivers of social vulnerability. C40 is a network of 94 of the world's cities fostering policies to address climate change. We apply a mixed methods approach, including a discourse analysis and meta-analysis of adaptation plans. The discourse analysis helps to unpack framings of urban equity issues as they relate to policy actions, and the meta-analysis seeks to quantitatively investigate patterns of framing and policy across adaptation plans. Our findings suggest that FEW-nexus thinking is not yet embedded in narrative understandings of risk and planned adaptation actions, within the adaptation plans we studied. In the city adaptation plans we analyzed, we found multiple frames coexisting behind the broader adaptation visions (e.g., risk and resilience). Rather than converging, issues, and principles such as those of equality, coexist with economic issues in an imbalance of incongruent political movements and priorities. Techno-infrastructural and economic investments and concerns tend to take precedence over concerns and interests for inequality in climate risks. We discuss some of the institutional factors explaining this. Knowledge integration, for instance, is constrained by the existence of a plurality of sectors, levels of government, power, values, and ways of understanding and managing climate risk. We also suggest that the relatively low importance of equality considerations in the adaptation plans will likely limit the capacity of cities to support broader goals such as those of the New Urban Agenda and the Sustainable Development Goals.

Transformational climate action at the city scale: comparative South–North perspectives

“…Their schema identified seven principal risk themes, of which negotiating trade-offs and governance of multiple stakeholders were the top priorities for attention to enable such a transformation. Reducing differential vulnerabilities is also crucial to coping with urban risk (Romero-Lankao et al 2018b;Romero-Lankao & Gnatz 2019), as examined in the next subsection.…”

A systematic review of social equity in FEWS analyses

“…FEWS are tightly linked to human activities, as their flows are essential influences on health, wellbeing, safety, economic opportunities, and sustainable development (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz, 2019). Understanding FEWS interactions from a sustainable system perspective while integrating social and economic factors is vital in the face of new and increasingly complex societal risks (White et al, 2017).…”

“…To conceptualize equity in a FEWS context, various dimensions of social equality and justice must be considered. Social equality is a state of even distribution of resources across all people (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz, 2019). Social justice is a similar but more encompassing concept focusing on resource distribution and less quantifiable dimensions such as fair treatment and equal protection.…”

“…As Smaal et al (2020) epitomized, "the 'what' of justice [is] economic redistribution (equal share), cultural recognition (equal respect) and political representation (equal say)" (p. 712). Race, ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status are some of the identities that can act as cultural barriers to both distributional justice and effective participation or equal say in FEWS policy development (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz, 2019).…”

“…In an equitable system, high-quality FEWS resources are accessible regardless of power and assets of social, political, economic, or spatial nature. We consider equity analyses to entail explicit incorporation of social identity aspects and an attempt to measure the fair distribution of sufficient, affordable, and reliable FEWS resources (Romero-Lankao and Gnatz, 2019;Proctor et al, 2021). Additionally, a challenging but important consideration is cultural preferences, perceptions, and beliefs around FEWS resources, which can inform a more comprehensive understanding of FEWS equity (D'Odorico et al, 2018).…”