Climate change and emerging risks. Innovative urban climate services as a strategy to improve resilience of human systems

Climate change and extreme natural events are increasingly threatening human systems. Even if greenhouse gases emission were reduced to zero today, global warming and the consequent climate change would continue to affect future generations: as climate is changing, human systems must learn to adapt. This study focuses on the role, the use and the management of climate information to overcome the barriers to climate change adaptation action. The article first addresses the relationship between sustainable development and climate change, regarded as "two mutually reinforcing sides of the same coin". After a short section on the complementarity of mitigation and adaptation strategies, it analyses the barriers to investments in climate adaptation action by public authorities: the uncertainty about the magnitude and the frequency of climate change-connected events, the common wrong perception of unlikelihood of global warming consequences and the intrinsic complexity characterizing human systems are identified as major constraints. These considerations lead to introduce the concepts of soft-resilience and low-regret adaptation strategies. The discipline of climate change adaptation based on soft-approach climate resilience strategies is closely linked to information management, information technologies, communications, logistics, geographic information services and good governance. Indeed, information management is here seen as the pillar of soft-approach strategies. Low-regret strategies are defined as measures that would generate net social and/or economic benefits both under current climate and a range of future climate change scenarios. Section 5 explores potential synergies between Climate Services (understood as any service, equipment, techniques, practical knowledge and skills that can be used to increase climate resilience of human system) and Urban Facility Management services. This study identifies Innovative Urban Climate Services, an integrated system of services addressing both climate and urban issues simultaneously, as an effective, soft-approach and low-regret strategy to overcome the barriers to adaptation action. These solutions provide a general framework allowing a flexible and customized support for human systems in adapting to unavoidable impacts of climate change. (paper)