Asset planning for climate change adaptation: lessons from Cartagena, Colombia

In studies of climate change vulnerability, an important constraint relates to the uncertainty of the climate projections that local governments need to estimate precisely the risks and impacts climate events have on different parts of a city. In addition, the lack of “downscaled”, or local, climate information makes it very difficult to compare how individual communities and households adapt to severe and extreme weather events and, more importantly, what actions local governments can carry out to increase resilience in poor urban areas. Based on a conceptual and operational framework developed in recent years by the authors in collaboration with partners in the global South, this paper illustrates how “bottom-up” community asset planning for climate change adaptation can help to address this gap and be mainstreamed into “top-down” citywide strategic and operational planning. The paper describes the process by which community members and representatives of local government, the private sector and NGOs working in the city of Cartagena, Colombia, set up a dialogue space that enables them to identify, negotiate and agree climate change adaptation solutions that are legally, financially, socially and technically feasible.