Benedetta Baldassarre

Nature-based recreational activities are highly sensitive to climate change. Particularly, hiking tourism is exposed to weather and climate variability that can affect the accessibility and attractiveness of trekking routes and alter tourism seasonality and flows. Thus, there is an urgent need for climate adaptation actions for effectively responding to climatic and environmental pressures and ensuring continuity of outdoor tourism experiences. So far, responses within the tourism sector have been largely managed by individual operators, through unsustainable coping measures aimed at managing climate variability and related shifts in supply and demand patterns. Integrated approaches that could promote more effective, long-term climate adaptation, while enhance landscape heritage resources and prioritize the needs of the local community remain weak and isolated. This challenge is even more pressing in rural communities where nature-based tourism is envisioned as a sustainable driver for economic revitalization and socio cultural innovation against depopulation and aging. However, they frequently lack adequate resources, institutional support, and policy frameworks to implement effective adaptation strategies, while short-term management decisions and low public awareness further exacerbate vulnerabilities.This contribution presents a participatory adaptive planning approach for nature-based tourism in rural contexts. The case study involves six small municipalities in the Fiastra river valley (Marche region, Italy), where a cultural trekking route – the Anello della Val di Fiastra – has been developed to promote responsible territorial enhancement by combining slow tourism, unique natural landscapes and the local cultural heritage. A scenario-based planning workshop was organized to engage stakeholders in discussing plausible future climate conditions for thevalley. Participants were projected to the year 2068, characterized by rising temperatures, increased frequency of heatwaves and tropical nights, and more intense rainfall events. They were asked to identify landscape assets most at risk and to co-design adaptive solutions to preserve territorial attractiveness and ensure the walkability of the route throughout the year. Environmental hiking guides, tourism operators, heritage managers, and representatives of local cultural associations collectively mapped vulnerable and exposed places along the route and discussed potential responses, spatializing them where possible. Proposals ranged from long-term strategies to operational measures and tactical interventions, including nature-based and engineering solutions, financial instruments, tourism supply management, training and awareness-raising initiatives, and governance actions. The workshop was conducted within the newly established landscape observatory of the Fiastra Valley, a local entity studying landscape dynamics and risk conditions towards bettermanagement policies. Findings provide insights into the actors and planning instruments required for effective adaptive decision-making in nature-based tourism. Moreover, this studyhighlights the value of community-based and interdisciplinary research in fostering mutual learning and co-creation of knowledge, by redefining spaces and modes of relationship between local authorities and actors for risk management and climate adaptation.The research is part of the project “QUI Val di Fiastra”, funded by the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan, Intervention 2.1 – Attractiveness of historic villages.

Nowadays, decision-makers and spatial planners are increasingly faced with a multitude of complex and interconnected challenges which include among others the adaptation to climate change, disaster risk reduction and the management of cultural heritage. However, there is a lack of easy-to-use resources and methodologies for them to access robust science-based knowledge and translate it into planning instruments. In addition, efforts for integrating different policy domains that are traditionally managed by siloed and specialised legislative frameworks remain limited, while weak mechanisms for monitoring and updating policy responses are put in place. This hinders the development of effective and holistic policies that could address not just one, but several societal challenges simultaneously. As part of the Horizon Europe funded project RescueME, aimed at increasing the resilience of coastal cultural landscapes, a methodology of policy analysis has been developed through which researchers and local experts can integrate their specific expertise. This approach is based on the collection and mapping of all relevant policy and planning tools in the sectors of spatial planning, climate change adaptation, disaster risk reduction and cultural heritage management of five case study areas across Europe, namely Neuwerk (Germany), Psiloritis (Greece), Valenca (Spain), Zadar (Croatia) and Portovenere and Cinque Terre (Italy). Through a questionnaire, key information is extracted and then used to assign rankings for an indicator-based policy assessment. The overall goal is to evaluate the adaptive capacity and the level of inclusion of provisions for cultural heritage management, climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction into existing environmental and spatial planning tools, as the basis for the development of policy recommendations tailored to local contexts and demands. The results reveal significant variation between tools and the different case study areas, in terms of the adaptiveness, accessibility and cross-sector coordination. However, there are also common barriers such as unclear hierarchies between different policies and administrative scales as well as gaps in the specificity of policy monitoring and review mechanisms. The work demonstrates how a methodology based on structured quantification of policy characteristics, combined with continuous engagement between researchers and practitioners, may facilitate closing governing gaps and strengthen the effectiveness of policies various administrative levels.

Over the last 20 years, the tourism-climate change nexus has emerged as a policy and research issue, animating a polarized debate between climate mitigation and adaptation for the sector. While the position of tourism with respect to its contribution to climate change and decarbonization requirements are clearly acknowledged by both scientific community and governments, a place-specific, risk-informed planning for climate change adaptation becomes increasingly pressing. It is even more urgent for rural areas, that envision cultural tourism-driven strategies as a sustainable pathway for economic and social regeneration. They are strongly threatened by rapid and intensifying climate change impacts, loss of biodiversity and environmental pressures on their cultural and natural values, and compared to urban areas, they are not yet equipped to respond effectively, and their socio-economic conditions are often aggravated by short-term management decisions, lack of institutional support, inadequate policy implementation efforts and low public awareness. So far, the impacts of climate change on tourism have been investigated through various methodological approaches, mostly focused on forecasting climatic changes and analyzing how they would modify global tourism flows. These approaches resulted in a lack of appropriate contextualization of climate risk in tourism destinations, and the consequences of multiple climate-related hazards interacting with environmental, economic, social, cultural and political factors at local scale are often neglected. Consequently, destinations apply short-term, unsustainable coping strategies and individual adjustments to climate variability and related alterations in tourism demand-supply patterns, rather than pursuing a more strategic and long-term climate change adaptation. The study proposes a conceptual and methodological framework aimed at performing a spatially explicit multi-hazard risk assessment, and it combines data-based and community-based approaches involving local stakeholders in assessing climate risk and co-designing tailored adaptive solutions to be implemented at destination scale. It builds on the acknowledgement that spatial planning can support an effective, future-oriented climate change adaptation for cultural tourism, and act as an information-based instrument for coordinating different activities and transformation patterns over the territory, as well as a mechanism for the implementation of adaptation measures on the ground. This perspective has been strengthened through a case study implementation, which involved six small historical villages in the Fiastra Valley, an inner rural area in the Province of Macerata, Marche region, Italy. Here, participatory planning and community-based action research have been tested, proving the value of engaging diverse actors of society in mutual learning and co-creation of innovative knowledge. In that sense, transdisciplinary research represents a powerful way for tackling complex challenges, where territorial planning can bring together multiple fields – climate change adaptation, risk management, rural regeneration, cultural tourism planning, landscape management. Such models of place-based understanding can better boost transitions to sustainability, by bridging science–policy–society divide and supporting scientific evidence for policy, from scientists to policymakers.

Policies are a deliberate system that defines action and guides short-term decisions in pursuing a goal. Policy is a fundamental instrument of governance which is extensively used worldwide. However, not all policies are created equally. Contemporary literature is littered with examples of policy failures, and a large research emphasis is dedicated to co-creating ‘good’ policy. This challenge of developing good policy is exacerbated when we consider the rapidly evolving risks related to climate change. The evolving risks can make it difficult to define valid policy goals over the longer term. Furthermore, stakeholders are increasingly needed across policy and practice to overcome siloed working and co-create transdisciplinary risk management policies, considering both long-term strategic objectives and short- to medium-term operational solutions. Risk management policy instruments are relevant across spatial scales and engage with policies from other disciplines (urban planning, heritage conservation, environmental management). The article presents an innovative tool called the policy matrix to address challenges faced by policy experts. The policy matrix capitalises upon the co-creative research of the Organigraphs technique defined by Durrant et al. (2021) to co-create disaster risk management governance maps. The article compares two policy matrices developed as part of a Horizon 2020-funded project called SHELTER. In its simplest form, a policy matrix arranges risk management policy instruments around an issue depending on their scale of implementation and disciplinary lens. This allows stakeholders to see all the policy instruments considered relevant to some specific issues. It can further provide stakeholders a robust platform to critique those policies. By way of example, providing them with a tool to clearly “measure” the links between these policies, to identify policy gaps in thematic/operationalisation, or, from a practical perspective, to provide a tool for experts to review the level of participation in the design of these policies or the effectiveness of these policies in practice.

Recent seismic events and the damages related to them have highlighted the crucial role of urban planning in coping with the fragility and intrinsic vulnerability of cities. The paper presents a methodology for assessing seismic risk at an urban scale, expanding from a single-building investigation to an urban-scale analysis by adopting an empirical method for assessing the vulnerability of the urban fabric. Data collection and analysis have been conducted through the Geographic Information System (GIS). The methodology has been applied to the Italian city of Castelfranco Emilia, in the Emilia-Romagna region, where the current regional urban planning law is guiding municipalities towards the development of strategies mostly oriented toward the retrofit of the existing building stock and the overall regeneration of the urbanized territory, in accordance with the target of no net land take by 2050. The novelty of the method stands in the transposition of approaches born in the civil engineering and protection domains to the urban planning sphere, stressing the importance of developing urban planning instruments which are well-integrated with vulnerability assessments and, therefore, able to successfully incorporate risk considerations in the decision making.