Guía de gobernanza de las infraestructuras críticas urbanas para municipios resilientes en el contexto del cambio climático

Abstract

Today, most of the world's population is concentrated in urban areas. These areas have become highly complex systems, facing a changing context conditioned by factors such as climate change (CC), or the dependency on critical infrastructures (CIs). Cities are increasingly suffering CC impacts such as the sea-level rise or more extreme weather events (in terms of an increase in the frequency and intensity of the extreme events and the likelihood of extremely hot days and nights). Moreover, CC has a differential element, it is a dynamic threat with a high degree of uncertainty associated with it. This fact means that municipalities must develop adequate capacities to enable them to face current and future scenarios associated with CC. In this sense, in addition to adopting mitigation and adaptation measures, urban areas must improve their resilience. However, building resilience is not an easy task and entitles many structural, social, cultural, economic, environmental, and governance challenges. In this regard, in recent years many frameworks have been developed to help cities develop and improve their resilience strategies. These frameworks recognize the need to manage urban CIs for developing city resilience but do not specify how to do so. This thesis focuses on the governance of urban CIs for improving city resilience. This research aims to provide municipalities with a tool to help them in the development of governance models for their CIs, for improving city resilience to CC. To that end, different methodologies have been applied to access both academic knowledge and expert knowledge based on people's experience. In this sense, in the development phase, the use of participatory methodologies has been prioritized. As a result, this thesis proposes a guide to help municipalities develop a governance model for their CIs to improve resilience to CC. The guide proposes a four-step process based on five questions that will help municipalities to set strategic objectives and identify appropriate governance mechanisms to improve their resilience to CC. To that end, governance enabling factors and drivers have been identified. Furthermore, based on the identification of the most relevant actors and their roles, several options for governance structures are proposed. In addition, basic resilience dimensions have been identified and fifteen actions are proposed. Finally, some instruments and good practices have been identified to facilitate the implementation of the strategies. Finally, the case study methodology has been to validate the guide. In this sense, two case studies have been carried out in the Basque Country, a city and a small municipality.