Cross-scale barriers to climate change adaptation in local government, Australia

摘要: Many of the impacts of climate change and variability such as droughts, flooding, storm surges and sea level rise have or will be experienced at the local level; requiring a wide range of local interventions in response (Corfee-Morlot et al., 2009). As a result, local governments in Australia and overseas have initiated plans to adapt to these impacts. As is discussed in Section 2, many initiatives have been put in place to support the development and implementation of these plans. However, the pathway to planning and implementation of adaptation is not a barrier free process. Barriers or constraints manifest themselves from within and externally to the responsible organisation. These can take the form of capacity and financial constraints, competing priorities, planning time horizons are longer than political lives of decision makers, and the absence of overarching legislative frameworks that take climate change into consideration, to mention a few (Mukheibir and Ziervogel, 2007; Smith et al., 2008).Furthermore, local government is embedded in a larger multi-scale governance context consisting of a range of State and non-State actors influencing the adaptation decisionmaking space. Moreover, adaptation planning within local government or other vulnerable sectors does not occur in isolation; it is dependent on the extent of adaptation occurring at various spatial scales and within sectors. As Adger et al.(2008, p. 340) suggests, this dependency of adaptation decisions on scale and agency may give rise to hidden limits to adaptation in an increasingly complex and inter-connected society. It is thus pertinent to understand and address the critical cross …