What drives local climate change adaptation? A qualitative comparative analysis

Climate change impacts vary wildly across different geographical contexts and their effects are primarily felt on the local level, generating demand for local solutions. The local level plays a key role in the adaptation to climate change. Nevertheless, in most European countries adaptation has yet to be integrated comprehensively into local policy agendas. To further our understanding of this slow pace of local adaptation progress, we study 21 Swiss Alpine municipalities exposed to a variety of natural hazards and issues exacerbated by local climate change impacts. Building on established research on local natural hazard management and climate change adaptation, we expect four factors to play decisive roles, either on their own or in combination with each other: Past extreme events, risk exposure, perceived climate risk and existing adaptation policies at superordinate levels. We test these expectations using qualitative comparative analysis (QCA). We find that significant past extreme events and high perceived climate risk come close to being necessary conditions for local adaptation measures. High perceived climate risk on its own is also a sufficient condition for local adaptation measures to be taken while its absence is sufficient for no local adaptation measures to be taken. Thus, the importance of climate risk perception exceeds our expectation as it has clearly been revealed to be the most important factor. Future research should focus on disentangling different levels of public risk perception further and investigate the role different levels of perception or acceptance among different actor groups play in climate policy decisions.