How are climate change adaptation strategies put into practice?: a case study comparison of natural hazard prevention

Abstract

Climate change affects increasingly the management of natural resources and has diverse impacts of environmental, social and economic nature. To take this complexity into account, climate change adaptation policies consider the principle of sustainable development. Sustainability is an integrative concept which should insure a long-term and multi-sectoral response to climate change. But the question appears if sustainable development is only retained at the conceptual level or effectively implemented in practice. This paper pursues this question by comparing three projects addressing natural hazard in Swiss mountains. The aim is to investigate how sustainable development is perceived by involved stakeholders and implemented in practice. Two dimensions are thus taken into account: the type of actors participating in these projects and their preferences and interests. The first dimension thus analyzes if diverse actors representing the environmental, economic and social arenas are integrated; the second dimension investigates if different interests and preferences in the sense of sustainability were incorporated in the design and implementation of climate change adaptation. Data were gathered through a standardized survey among all actors involved in the three projects. Preliminary results show that sustainability receives diverse weight and interest in the different cases.