Are cities aware enough? A framework for developing city awareness to climate change

Abstract

Cities are growing and becoming more complex, and as they continue to do so, their capacity to deal with foreseen and unforeseen challenges derived from climate change has to adapt accordingly. In the last decade, an effort has been made to build city resilience and improve cities’ capacity to respond to, recover from and adapt to climate change. However, certain city stakeholders’ lack of proactive behavior has resulted in less effective city resilience-building strategies. In this sense, the importance of developing stakeholders’ awareness of climate change in order to ensure proactivity is documented in the literature. However, there is a lack of studies that define how, when and what should be done to develop stakeholders’ climate change awareness at a city scale. This paper presents a framework to develop stakeholders climate change awareness as a result of a systematic literature review and a co-creation process with the participation of 47 experts through a focus group and a Delphi study. The framework defines a four-step process and includes nine policies that seek to develop stakeholders’ climate change awareness. The framework concludes determining the responsibilities of each stakeholder by defining the policies they should implement, and the effect one policy might cause on other stakeholders and among policies.