Urban Coastal Areas Facing Climate Change Risks: Barriers and Opportunities for Agenda Setting

This workshop is organized with the support of LIEPP’s Environmental policies Research group (Sciences Po, Université Paris Cité).

June 16th 2025, 9h - 19h
Sciences Po - Salle du Conseil (5th floor)
13 rue de l'Université, 75007 Paris

Background

The cost of coastal disasters has reached record levels over the past decade and is expected to increase, according to climate projections through 2100, due in large part to climate change (NOAA 2023, Kirezci et al. 2020). Despite this, coastal adaptation, particularly in urban areas, has been slow to materialize (Wannewitz et al. 2024). Adaptation, including post-disaster
reconstruction, is expensive and often a source of tension (Elliott 2021). Urban coastal areas, at the crossroads of urbanization and coastalization processes, are especially vulnerable and stand at the forefront of adaptation efforts. These areas are vital to regional and global economies, with commercial, industrial, and tourism activities concentrated in fragile environments. As debates over the feasibility and modalities of relocation intensify, they often stumble over the specificities of urban spaces, particularly port areas.

This adaptation raises several key questions: What are the risks affected by climate change, considered or overlooked at the local level: territorial and environmental risks, social risks, and how do they interact? Which combination of technical solutions (gray or blue/green infrastructures) and socio-economic transformations are observed, how are they measured and monitored, and against which standards and objectives can they be evaluated? How do evolving risks and the policies addressing them affect various forms of justice (procedural, distributive, restorative, territorial, inter-generational)? Finally, how can we manage the temporal trajectories of these adaptations, balancing urgent actions with the anticipation of future events? These questions must be examined at the local scale, as adaptation requires specific transformations in spaces of production, living, and representation (Grafakos et al. 2018). The degree and possibility of these transformations must also be questioned. 

Adaptation solutions remain fragmented. As early as 2008, the OECD highlighted the vulnerability of port cities and proposed conventional risk management measures (Nicholls et al. 2008). Cities such as New York, Rotterdam, Jakarta, and Hong Kong are seeking to innovate in both infrastructure and governance, yet their proposals often fall short in the eyes of affected populations (Aerts et al. 2013, Goh 2021). Hybrid solutions (combining infrastructure and nature-based approaches) are increasingly promoted (Sutton-Grier et al. 2015), but their implementation remains complex and requires a rethinking of epistemic and participatory frameworks for public action (Bongarts Lebbe et al. 2021). Despite initiatives such as "Sea’ties," which promote the sharing of adaptation practices, the concrete implementation of adaptation remains insufficient, creating an "adaptation deficit" (Valente and Veloso-Gomes 2020). Research on urban coastal areas, though advanced in some countries, still struggles to account for the specific challenges of urban areas, which are often overlooked in favor of non-urbanized coastal zones (Bazin 2022). There is a growing necessity to identify, characterize and evaluate the various forms of urban coastal adaptation needs and practices emerging globally.

The workshop

The goal of this workshop is to enhance interdisciplinary dialogue and better structure research on climate change risks in urban coastal areas. In France, with over 5,800 km of coastline, these issues are particularly critical. International comparisons of adaptation research and practices will be essential to advance the discussion.

The workshop will be organized around four main themes:

1. Definitions and Knowledge of Climate Risks and strategies: What are the risks identified and placed on the agenda in urban coastal areas, and what forms of response do they leverage? 
    
2. Governance and Public Action: How are multi-stakeholder relationships, public policies, and their instruments evolving to address climate risks at the local level?
    
3. Controversies and Climate Justice: How are justice issues integrated into adaptation policies for coastal areas?
    
4. Evaluation and monitoring: What tools and practices are used to define, monitor, evaluate, and guide local public action on climate adaptation?

These discussions aim to better understand and structure solutions to the growing challenges of climate risks. To question the specificity of urban coastal areas, we also encourage comparative perspectives of urban and non-urban coastal areas, or coastal and non-coastal urban areas. The event seeks to intersect various disciplinary perspectives, including geography, urban studies, political science, sociology, and political economy. The event will feature Rebecca Elliott as keynote speaker.

Workshop host: Cassandre Rey-Thibault, Bruno Latour Fund postdoctoral fellow, Sciences Po, CEE. 

Programme

8:30 | Arrival and coffee/breakfast

9:00 | Welcoming by the organizers

9h15  | Session 1 – Controversial and transforming definitions and knowledges of urban climate risks
Chair: Anne-Laure Beaussier

• Stefania Fiorentino (University of Cambridge): Tackling regeneration in by the British coast facing overlapping socio-economic and environmental challenges.
• Nathan Marom (Sciences Po, Reichman University) and Uri Ansenberg (The Open University): Rising Seas, Shifting Lines, Transferring Rights: Critical Reflections from Urban Coastal Israel

10h15 | Session 2 – Governance and public action towards “adaptation”
Chair: Roberto Rodriguez

• Adrien Duprielle (Université de Montpellier): Levers and barriers to putting the adaptation pathways of coastal areas to climate change on the political agenda. The example of the Occitanie region.
• Giovanna Ferramosca (Università degli studi di Napoli "Federico II"): The moving territories of the coast. The case of the mediterranean, between criticalities and opportunities of hazards adaptation processes
  between land and sea
• Cassandre Rey-Thibault (Sciences Po Paris): Is risk-management enough to adapt to future coastal compounding risks? A comparison of coastal port urban areas to understand how adaptation may be mainstream.

12h | Lunch

13h30 | Keynote Session, Rebecca Elliott, Associate Professor of Sociology (London School of Economics and Political Science): Towards a Sociology of Incumbency in the Face of Climate Change

14h45 | Session 3 – Controversies and climate justice in face of adaptation
Chair: Joel Ansah

• Karl Dudman (University of Oxford): Adaptation as a ‘safe space’ for public engagement
• Michael Sullivan (St Mary’s College): Protecting Arctic Ecological Migrants

15h45 | Coffee Break

16h15 | Session 4 – Evaluation and monitoring of coastal adaptation tools & policies
Chair: Charlotte Halpern

• Aubrée Louarn (Université de Brest): Three Key Challenges for Urban Coastal Nature-Based Solutions: Urbanization, the Coast, and Nature(s)
• Marion Perney (Università degli studi di Napoli "Federico II" ; Université Gustave Eiffel): Transforming systems through territorial approaches and capitalisation of best practices: bridging science, policy, and practice for mediterranean coastal resilience
• Giacomo Ricchiuto (Politecnico di Milano): The ‘Italian Way’ of doing Planned Retreat. Radical Approach to Redesigning Urbanised Coastlines

17h45 | Conclusion and general discussion introduced by Charlotte Halpern & Cassandre Rey-Thibault

18h30 | End of the workshop

Organizing committee

• Joel Ansha, PhD student, Sciences Po, CERI
• Anne-Laure Beaussier, Sciences Po CSO
• Max Cocard, LIEPP Environmental research group assistant
• Charlotte Halpern, Sciences Po, CEE, LIEPP
• Martin Hendel, ESIEE Paris, LIED, LIEPP
• Andreana Khristova, LIEPP, Sciences Po
• Cassandre Rey-Thibault, Bruno Latour Fund postdoctoral fellow, Sciences Po, CEE
• Roberto Rodriguez, Sciences Po, LIEPP, CEE