Early Steps for an Effective Governance Framework to Adapt Urban Beaches to Climate Change Regarding Ecosystems and Ecosystem Services: the case of Cala Millor

Abstract

[eng] The effects caused by climate change on coastal systems, especially in terms of sea level rise and associated extreme events, are a major concern for coastal management and society. When implementing management strategies, a lack of information can lead to the alteration of natural systems with an important role in coastal protection, leading to the need for new mitigation, monitoring and/or adaptation projects. However, reaching solutions agreed by the entire community can be challenging. Cala Millor (Balearic Islands, Spain) is an example of a transformed coastal ecosystem where land development has led to the modification of a dune system and consequent erosion of a beach system, leaving buildings exposed to storm events and coastal flooding. This risk affects not only the environment, but also the entire settled population, including two municipalities, hotels, schools and associations for the elderly, among others. Adaptation climate change plans of urban beaches should be elaborated considering all public administrations and taking into account society needs and requirements, in order to minimize the risks associated with sea level rise and coastal flooding. To this end, this Master Thesis proposes a multilevel governance perspective with a two-way communication and participatory approach. On one hand, the creation and involvement of the Working Group using the Think-Reason-Understand-Share-Test (TRUST) method aims to apply a practical and hands-on approach, to obtain and use information to influence change. On the other hand, the 'communication, listening and involvement' method is selected for engaging society, being active and respectful, useful and adding value. In this work, the early steps of involving the public administration representatives and society perception are presented establishing three specific objectives: i) to develop a protocol to lay the foundations for the creation of a participatory mechanism of public administrations for the design of climate change adaptation plan; ii) to analyze the perceptions, attitudes and opinions of policy makers at local, island and regional level, regarding the effects of climate change on coastal ecosystems and ecosystem services at Cala Millor; iii) to analyze the perception of changes in coastal ecosystems and knowledge of climate change among society of Cala Millor, focusing, in this work, on scholars that will be potentially affected by the adaptation plan. The methodology used for the creation of the participatory mechanism for public administration was the development of documents and the collaboration with governmental entities for the review, as well as the Interest-Influence relation analysis of the potential members. For the study of the public administration’s perception of the effects of climate change in Cala Millor and scholars group’s perception and knowledge analysis, a survey method was implemented for the data collection and the analysis was carried out by means of the software R v.4.1.4. Results present all needed documentation produced for settling the participation mechanism. Regarding the analysis of the surveys, the main results show that sociodemographic data and the relationship of the representatives of the public administrations with Cala Millor can influence the perception of the effects of climate change in the study area and also their behaviours and attitudes. On the other hand, most scholars do not seem to perceive the effects of climate change at Cala Millor regarding ecosystems and do not know what ‘climate change’ concept is. Also, significant differences between their knowledge regarding the age and their parents' position have been found. Future designed awareness campaigns should include basic knowledge and emphasize on the differences between climate change and sustainability.