Adaptation – a planning business
Climate change is threatening cities and communities all over the world. Europe belongs to the least impacted regions – still we already witness the impacts of climate change at our threshold.
The frequency of heat waves and heavy rains has significantly risen in the past years. Although on the one hand, we are not affected by water scarcity in Bonn, heat waves are a serious threat to health when thinking of the most vulnerable groups amongst our citizens – young children and elderly people. On the other hand, heavy rains are affecting Bonn increasingly – leading to spontaneous stream floods with unpredictable impacts on infrastructure and people. Bonn has a long history of river floods and hence a long-lasting experience in flood protection, however, the new flood scenarios require new approaches.
As an immediate consequence, Bonn became part of a planner’s dialogue on floodings with the German Institute on Urbanistic. Together with the German Weather Service and the State Agency for Environment and Consumer Protection of North Rhine-Westphalia we are currently working on an interactive, web-based information system for climate-adapted city planning in NRW, based on a pre-study in Bonn. This process shall lead to an interactive and web-based tool, enabling as many cities in NRW as possible to evaluate the effects of different planning scenarios on the objective and subjective temperature level.
Climate change is a cross-cutting issue and can therefore only be coped with in a joint effort of municipal departments and responsibilities. The German Ministry of Education and Research has launched their ZURES-programme on future-oriented vulnerability and risk assessment as a tool to increase resilience in cities and urban infrastructure. Bonn has joined the programme in order to develop project, evaluation and planning tools for our urban planning (German: Bauleitplanung). These tools will feature climate assessments for our city with a three-dimensional, high resolution meso scale climate model, planning guidance maps and scenarios. In a second project of that same federal ministry, we are working with the Institute for Waste and Water Management of the University of Aachen to get to a practitioner’s evaluation based on test cases of a city climate model yet to be developped. In the same field, we are contributing to a regional climate prevention strategy of our Cologne/Bonn area.
It’s all about cooperation
While all these regional programmes cater for mitigation and resilience in Bonn, on the ground Bonn has also taken special responsibility to advocate for climate action and sustainability amongst the German cities. Bonn is a hub for climate actors – and Bonn provides a unique communication culture bridging structures and sectoral topics. The cross-cutting issue of climate change is the link between all these stakeholders and key players – from the federal ministry to German development cooperation, from sustainability certification bodies like the forest stewardship council to ICLEI Local Governments for Sustainability. Since 2016, I am ICLEI’s First Vice President, holding the portfolio of the cities climate registry carbonn as well as the Bonn Climate negotiations.
Furthermore, I patron the Resilient Cities Congress, which will take place from 4 to 6 May, so this week. The Resilient Cities congress series has profiled as the globally most relevant conference on cities, adaptation and resilience. It brings together cities, academia and business, and deals with global agendas, speaking of Sendai and resilience, of Addis Ababa and financing, of Quito and Habitat III and of course of the Paris Agreement on Climate.
A successful local sustainability agenda has to take into consideration all these agendas. With the 2030 Agenda pilot project “Globally sustainable local government in NRW”, Bonn will advance towards a holistic and participatory sustainability strategy.
Global or local – it will not work out without cities and regions, neither without cross-sectoral, multilevel action. May I invite you to join the movement?