A Stepwise Approach to Operationalise Climate Resilient Development Pathways Planning – with an Illustrative Application for Cork City in Ireland

Abstract

To achieve climate resilient societies, climate adaptation, mitigation, and sustainable development (AMD) are all necessary. The concept of “climate resilient development pathways” (CRDP) recognizes this as intertwined challenges. However, no systematic procedure exists for the creation and appraisal of CRDP that fully acknowledges interactions and integrates adaptation, mitigation, and sustainable development over time. Taking the established Dynamic Adaptive Pathways Planning (DAPP) approach as a starting point, this paper presents a novel and stepwise approach for climate resilient development adaptive pathways planning, or in short: CRDAPP. Key novelties of this approach are: a) visioning to design CRD strategies while dealing with complexity, b) performance and target tipping points to sequence measures, and c) AMD interaction typologies to build and evaluate pathways. We illustrate the approach through a qualitative example case study in Cork City, Ireland. The CRDAPP steps are carried out for the city, with multiple pathways designed and critical decisions over time identified. The resulting CRDP provide insights into the range of options for Cork on how to combine mitigation, adaptation, and sustainable development actions over time, in order to work toward different future states of the city. Herewith, the CRDP concept is operationalised and turned into a systematic stepwise approach that can support decisionmakers to integrate adaptation, mitigation, and sustainable development action over time and under uncertainty into their planning processes.

Keywords: Climate resilient development pathways, CRDP, CRDAPP, mitigation, adaptation, Sustainable development, DAPP