Glasgow City Region Climate Adaptation Strategy and Action Plan
2.3 Our ambition: transformational
adaptation, accelerated by systems- level innovation
Achieving our vision of a City Region that flourishes in a future climate will require widespread and sustained change. Glasgow City Region is getting ready to deliver its net-zero ambition in line with Scottish Government’s commitments and with Glasgow City aspiring to a more ambitious target to be carbon neutral by 2030. We want a similarly ambitious approach in Glasgow City Region for adaptation. Delivering this will require new types of response . Some interventions in the Strategy take a proactive but incremental approach to adaptation. In such cases, the aim is to improve the climate resilience of existing systems and actions. This often involves mainstreaming climate change into policies, programmes and plans. In other areas however, this incremental approach will not be sufficient to address the scale of future risks. In such cases, a different form of adaptation is needed, involving more transformational adaptation . 10 As actors in the region shift into more transformational responses, their coverage changes; there is more overlap with both the net-zero agenda and wider sustainable development in the region, and a ‘whole- systems’ approach is needed. This increases the potential for both synergies and trade-offs between adaptation wider socio-economic goals and requires engagement with and action by a more diverse set of actors. The interventions in the Adaptation Strategy (and set out in the next section) represent a suite of actions, that start with incremental adaptation but move to transformation, as well as shifting from climate risk alone to wider sustainable development. The diagram below sets out where the interventions of the Strategy sit in terms of this response and coverage. To complement and accelerate the interventions in the Adaptation Strategy and increase the pace and scale of change for adaptation, we have employed systems thinking to develop larger-scale innovation. Our vehicle for this approach has been the Resilient Regions: Clyde Rebuilt project, working in partnership with EIT Climate-KIC.
What is transformational adaptation?
Transformational adaptation involves changing existing approaches, altering governance arrangements, and addressing underlying causes of climate risk or vulnerability. It may also involve re-thinking the future vision of the region, including the societal, cultural, institutional, ecological and physical changes needed, as well as the region’s political economy. Transformational approaches call for systems thinking and socio-institutional analysis, and offer the potential to deliver a larger, more sustainable, permanent, long-term change (Source: Clyde Rebuilt, 2020).
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