ABSTRACT
Rising rates of urbanisation, accompanied by increasing consumption, puts the spotlight on how cities can mitigate and adapt to climate change (Wilbanks et al. 2007; Sattherthwaite et al. 2007; Bicknell et al. 2009). In many parts of the world cities are starting to develop policies and plans to adapt to the impacts of climate change (Birkmann et al. 2010; Corburn 2009; Horton et al. 2010). This city-scale policy focus is driven in part by the international scientific community which is encouraging adaptation as an important and urgent way to complement ongoing mitigation efforts that have tended to dominate policies and finance (Pielke et al. 2007; Romero-Lankao 2008), but it is also a reflection of the synergy between typical local government functions and the adaptation emphasis on sensible longterm settlement planning and local action to secure reliable engineering and ecosystem services (McCarney and Blanco 2011; Davoudi et al. 2009; Wheeler et al. 2009). Climate adaptation is not all top–down innovation. In many instances, especially in cities of the Global South where states have less capacity, it is driven by a bottom– up response from residents, reflecting greater public awareness of the need to better plan for climate variability in order to increase the resilience of cities and reduce exposure to risk (Bicknell et al. 2009).
