To solve and improve climate adaptation in cities, the PROCESA project, after a study, has established measures to create political plans in this area.

Cities around the world are leading climate action, creating major city networks, such as C40, and signing global commitments, such as the Global Covenant of Mayors. Even though involvement is high, globally, only 18% of urban areas have adaptation initiatives; in Europe, 47% of cities have adaptation plans. Progress is still insufficient, but also how do we know if these plans will reduce vulnerability?

For this reason, the Basque Centre for Climate Change (BC3) has completed the ‘PROCESA’ project with the aim of determining monitoring plans for the climate adaptation of Spanish cities. This initiative has had the support of the Biodiversity Foundation of the Ministry for Ecological Transition within the framework of its 2017 call for grants.

This action helps to answer these questions in the context of urban planning in Spain. To carry it out, two new approaches have been applied that have been tested in four pioneering cities. The first was developed to assess the credibility of adaptation policies by analyzing, among others, political and economic aspects, the technical knowledge used and its legitimacy. The second has been developed specifically within the framework of PROCESA to see the degree of alignment of these policies with climate risks and uncertainty, making use of the enormous experience at a global level in disaster risk management. Both approaches are critical when defining and developing climate policies and are proposed, as decision-support methodologies, to guide cities to start or improve local adaptation policy planning processes.

At PROCESA, the use of both tools for the adaptation policies of the 11 Spanish capitals that have a climate change adaptation plan has been explored.