How to tackle complexity in urban climate resilience? Negotiating climate science, adaptation and multi-level governance in India

in a timely and efficient manner, including through the preservation and restoration of its essen- tial basic structures and functions [45,46]. There is growing knowledge on the theory, methods, and practice of resilience across a vari- ety of country and case contexts, that demonstrates how a resilience-based approach can help further improve infrastructure, vibrant societies, and sustainable environments and ecologies, among many others [47]. At the same time, it is pertinent to explore how pursuing urban resil- ience would be different from implementing climate adaptation measures in cities. Adaptation and resilience are two concepts originally developed in dissimilar problem contexts but which are of significant importance for our ability to respond to a changing climate. A better appreci- ation of the relationship between the concepts of adaptation and resilience will provide more effective tools to plan for, and respond to, current and future change [48]. This research makes an attempt in this direction as we focus on how could climate resilience be pursued in urban areas while considering adaptation alternatives, in addition to several other complex variables in climate geoscience and urban governance (discussed above). Drawing from [23, 31, 48], we understand negotiated resilience from the perspective of incessant development policy and local governance based on localized climate change studies that offer clear benefits while employing downscaled Regional Concertation Pathways (RCPs) to establish a scientific justification for local adaptation policy.

However, in contrast to risk management, comprehensive approaches to assessing resil- ience at appropriate and operational scales, reconciling analytical complexity as needed with stakeholder needs and resources available, and ultimately creating actionable recommenda- tions to enhance resilience are still evolving [49]. The 4×4 Resilience Matrix is one such frame- work for the performance assessment of integrated complex through an adverse event, where the rows describe the four general management domains of any complex system: physical, information, cognitive, social and the columns describe plan/prepare, absorb/withstand, recover, adapt [50]. Through case studies of cities, such tools have been used to organize the many government agencies and community institutions across different spatial scales that con- tribute to the operation of each critical service. In this research, we try to upscale similar tools for country-wide application in response to future climate scenarios, thereby arriving at entry points for mainstreaming resilience at various levels of governance, and incorporation of cli- mate resilience building measures into different types of local/ urban plans. 3. Data and methods Based on the above theories, we formulate an integrated analytical framework (Fig 1), with the following techniques (and data) outlined to be performed sequentially: 3.1. Multi-level governance assessment We draw from secondary sources of information spanning from 1992 to 2020, essentially in the form of policy studies and peer-reviewed papers, to conduct a qualitative assessment of

multi-level governance systems, especially relevant to urban areas [10, 28, 51,52]. This assess- ment of the state of the affairs on the ground focuses on three core governance domains, namely functional mandate, plans and policies, and institutional capacities of Indian cities. 3.2. Simulating local climate scenarios Using data from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM) on their climate data portal [53], we retrieved the RCP 4.5 and 8.5 climate scenarios from the Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX. Here, we utilize techniques for downscaling global cli- mate forecasts [54–56], mapping regional temperature (˚C) and precipitation changes (in PLOS ONE Negotiating complexity of climate science, adaptation and multi-level governance in urban resilience PLOS ONE | https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0253904 July 1, 2021 4 / 21