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The interlinked nature of today's societal challenges asks for integrative approaches. The energy transition is an especially impactful challenge and presents a compelling opportunity to pursue integration, as it requires changes to space, landscape, infrastructure and organizations at different scales. While the added value of integrative approaches that address the energy transition alongside other societal challenges is widely acknowledged, it is not the status quo. The aim of this study is to uncover the institutional barriers to integration and suggest possibilities for redesign. The paper sheds light on a hitherto relatively understudied phase of integration, namely implementation. Two illustrative cases for energy transition integration are discussed; (i) sustainable residential heating combined with climate adaptation in the urban context, and (ii) biogas production from livestock manure for rural residential heating and nitrogen reduction in the Netherlands. Inspired by the Institutional Analysis and Development framework (IAD) and networks of action situations (NAS) concept, the study shows that in the context of energy transition integration, action situations are pillarized with incidental interactions happening between sectors and across scales. The rules that govern actor interactions stem from sectoral institutional arrangements and produce sectoral action situations. Factors that especially obstruct integration are financial streams, budgeting and designated task responsibilities of actors that favour sectoral, one-dimensional projects. Actors interact in sectoral action situations and struggle to establish links to plan for more integrative outcomes. As a way forward, the study illustrates how rules can be redesigned to create integrative action situations and what mechanisms may help to achieve this in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Urban areas are increasingly affected by extreme heat in the face of climate change, while the size and vulnerability of exposed populations are shifting due to economic development, demographic change, and urbanization. In addition to the need to assess future urban heat-related health risks, there is also an increasing need to design adaptation strategies that will be effective under varying levels of socioeconomic development and climate change. We use the case study of Houston, Texas, to develop and demonstrate a scenario-based approach to explore the effectiveness of both autonomous and planned heat-related adaptations under multiple plausible futures. We couple a heat risk model with urban climate projections (under the Representative Concentration Pathways) and vulnerability projections (under locally extended Shared Socioeconomic Pathways) to investigate the impact of different adaptation strategies under multiple scenario combinations. We demonstrate that, in the context of Houston, community-based adaptation strategies aiming to reduce social isolation are the most effective and the least challenging to implement across all plausible futures. Scenario-based approaches can provide local policymakers with context-specific assessments of possible adaptation strategies that account for uncertain futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Data scarcity is still a common barrier to adequately understanding urban access in Global South countries. Widely used location-based methods address the traditional definition of accessibility as the easiness to reach land-uses by means of available mobility modes. Space Syntax instead analyses accessibility as network centrality focusing only on the topological and geometric properties of urban layouts, making it comparatively less data-intense. However, the interpretation of its outputs is limited to its own theory. Knowledge is missing on how such metrics are comparable to the metrics produced by location-based methods. The objective of the research was to compare both approaches for mapping urban accessibility in two cities in Guatemala. Our hypothesis tested the assumption that Space Syntax metrics could consistently reflect accessibility conditions that so far have only been measured by location-based methods. We proposed an approach using volunteered geo-information and produced accessibility maps following both approaches that were then compared using Pearson correlations. Space Syntax metrics at low and high radii are consistently correlated with location-based access to land uses that reflect location quality at neighbourhood and city-wide scale correspondingly. Space Syntax metrics at lower radii reflect time-based access restrictions either posed in the location-based analyses or by reduced accessibility by public transport. The hypothesis acceptance, p < 0.01, expands the scope of accessibility knowledge derivable from limited data availability using Space Syntax, which is relevant for its applicability in data-scarce contexts by planners and researchers in the Global South. Rather than replacing location-based methods Space Syntax offers an important complementary measure to geographical accessibility. This having been said, Space Syntax could contribute to early-stage planning by gaining overall insights into patterns of urban access. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More often than not, assessments of future climate risks are based on future climatic conditions superimposed on current socioeconomic conditions only. The new IPCC-guided alternative global development trends, the shared socioeconomic pathways (SSPs), have the potential to enhance the integration of future socioeconomic conditions—in the form of socioeconomic scenarios—within assessments of future climate risks. Being global development pathways, the SSPs lack regional and sectoral details. To increase their suitability in sectoral and/or regional studies and their relevance for local stakeholders, the SSPs have to be extended. We propose here a new method to extend the SSPs that makes use of existing scenario studies, the (re)use of which has been underestimated so far. Our approach lies in a systematic matching of multiple scenario sets that facilitates enrichment of the global SSPs with regional and sectoral information, in terms of both storylines and quantitative projections. We apply this method to develop extended SSPs of human vulnerability in Europe and to quantify them for a number of key indicators at the sub-national level up to 2050, based on the co-use of the matched scenarios' quantitative outputs. Results show that such a method leads to internally consistent extended SSPs with detailed and highly quantified narratives that are tightly linked to global contexts. This method also provides multiple entry points where the relevance of scenarios to local stakeholders can be tested and strengthened. The extended SSPs can be readily employed to explore future populations' vulnerability to climate hazards under varying levels of socioeconomic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Twin climate cities are pairs of cities for which it is appropriate to assume that the future climate of a city 'A' will be significantly similar to the current climate of another city 'B'. In this paper, we explore the potential use of the climate twins approach for the development of adaptation strategies to climate change in urban areas. We propose an innovative and robust climate-matching method that is suitable to link cities' current and future climates. Of the 100 cities investigated, 70 have at least one twin climate region, and 39 have a twin climate city. The case-study revealed a highly significant similarity for temperature variables and heat-related indices, but a less significant similarity for precipitation variables. The Climate Twins approach appears to be a potentially effective mechanism for raising awareness about the pace of climate change and for easily identifying (1) future impacts and vulnerabilities associated with climate change as well as (2) policies, infrastructure, and best practices that should be implemented in a city in order to cope efficiently with future extreme temperature events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]