Scoping

A comprehensive CRA profits from an extensive scoping as it sets the ground for further steps and therefore lays the foundation for the scope and quality of the CRA. This initial process defines objectives (desired results of the analysis), context (subject of analysis, conditions for implementation), identifies stakeholders and assigns risk ownership. This step should result in an agreement on the objectives of the CRA and on the approach to be used for the analysis. All sub-steps are informed by the predefined set of principles emerging from the conceptual background.

Guiding questions - Objectives

• What is the objective of your CRA?

• What is the purpose of your CRA? What is the expected outcome? (These two questions should entail a brainstorming exercise on, among other things, an evaluation of the potential climate change impacts on different aspects of society; an estimation of the current and future climate risks; a first prioritization the most significant and urgent risks; inform the development and implementation of adaptation strategies, etc.)

• How should your objective feed into policy and decision-making?

• Which limitations and boundaries may the CRA have or do you see the region confronted with in this context? E.g. worst case scenario in the context of adaptation measures?

• How do your envisaged objectives and envisaged outcomes come together? Does this somehow influence the communication of your results?

• How does your envisaged timeline of your CRA look like? Provide more detail for each step.

The definition of objectives is an important task to better understand purpose, expected outcome and temporal and geographical boundaries of the CRA. This may entail a first brainstorming exercise, outlining expectations and needs and may already include relevant hazards, impacted sectors or vulnerable or disproportionally affected groups, together with an operational timeline of CRA activities. It is beneficial to outline the temporal and spatial boundaries as well as limitations of the risk assessment, thus providing relevant insights for next steps of the CRA.

Guiding questions - Context

• How have climate hazards, risks and impacts been assessed/handled in your region until now?

• What is the governance context (policies, regulations, legal obligations, strategies, available time and resources etc.) of the assessment?

• Which regional targets may be impacted by climate hazards/risk? (E.g., NetZero targets, UN Sustainable Development Goals, other regional/local goals targeting (sector-specific) transformation)

• How is your CRA relevant system defined (e.g., systems of interest, affected entities, functions and processes at risk, connections, dependencies, spatial and temporal scales)?

• Which sectors are relevant in your regions and which ones may be impacted by climate risk?

• What is your envisaged time horizon for the CRA in terms of risk outcome(s)? E.g. 20 years, 2050, 2100?

• Where do you place value for your region? What outcome should be avoided with respect to the assigned values?

• How bad could things plausibly get?

• AWhere do you suspected thresholds or tipping points (environmental/economic/social)?

• How do you expect your hazards to change in the future?

• What is your expected tolerance of risk (e.g. heat, drought, flooding) and how may it be helpful or restricting in your CRA process?

When conducting the scoping step, a region should elaborate on the context of their CRA (context analysis) by linking it both to the background that it comes from as well as the space that it will inform. This implies a broad contextualization ranging from risk relevant governance and policy aspects for the region (procedural, legislative, institutional conditions), the formulation of a clear system definition for the risk assessment including temporal and spatial dimensions as well as the consideration of available time and resources.

Guiding questions - Participation & Risk Ownership

• Who could be important stakeholders/groups to be included for participatory processes? It is helpful to clearly define the set of stakeholders that should be consulted throughout the CRA. However, this set of stakeholders can change throughout the process – especially with the outcome of the climate risk workflows.

• Who are relevant representatives of known vulnerable groups or exposed areas (priority groups)?

• How does your legal framework allow the inclusion of key groups?

• How is the risk assessment ownership regulated?

• How and who do you want to communicate your results to?

The ideal implementation of an inclusive CRA is hybrid and thus combines top-down application of knowledge together with bottom-up perspectives and experiences. Therefore, it is important for a region to decide the extent of participatory processes that are desired, also in the light of available resources. Once this is clarified, it is necessary for a region to identify a first set of stakeholders by listing representatives of, for example, impacted sectors, vulnerable groups or disproportionally affected areas, ministries, academia, civil protection agencies or other local and regional entities involved in CRM planning. Besides the Who, it is also relevant to decide When and How stakeholders, experts and priority groups should be included. Planning this thoroughly is important as stakeholder participation may lead to an increase of (time) efforts. Furthermore, in this step it is crucial to allocate ownership of risk to ensure communication and efficient CRM by assigning responsibility for the relative risk to stakeholders or the executing entity.

Fig. 6 Illustration created by Scriberia with The Turing Way community. CC-BY 4.0. 10.5281/zenodo.3332807

Throughout this task, relevant principles from the conceptual background should be reflected and find application through, for example, stakeholder selection, setting of goals and boundaries, and clearly defining the work plan to ensure quality and rigour.

Tip

Stakeholder selection is not necessarily concluded in the Scoping phase. Depending on a region’s Risk Outcome, the inclusion of stakeholders may be reassessed or changed as part of the Key Risk Assessment step which evaluates outcomes of the Risk Analysis, and thus indicates a back-and-forth of the process.

Tip

It can be beneficial for regions to include national (climate) risk or adaptation documents such as risk and vulnerability assessments prepared in an EU context.