Editing IPCC:AR6/WGII/Chapter-6 (section)

=== Case Study 6.4: San Juan: Multi-Hazard Risk and Resilience in Puerto Rico and Its Urban Areas ===

<div id="h2-30-siblings" class="h2-siblings"></div>

This case study illustrates multi-hazard risk and reviews the formation of a multi-stakeholder adaptation governance regime as one response to this.

In two weeks in 2017, Puerto Rico experienced two powerful hurricanes, Irma (category 5) and María (category 4). The compound effects decimated the island’s power, water, communications and transportation infrastructure, and an estimated 2975 people lost their lives (Irvin-Barnwell et al., 2020; Santos-Burgoa et al., 2018). Soon after, while many homes still had no electricity or roofs and the tree canopy was still bare, Puerto Ricans were faced with cascading effects including environmental health impacts from air pollution, extreme heat and mosquitoes (Ortiz et al., 2020). In 2020, while still recovering, Puerto Ricans experienced earthquakes, extreme African dust events, intense coastal and urban floods, and the COVID-19 pandemic ( [[#Keck--2020|Keck, 2020]] ; [[#NASA%20Explore%20Earth--2020|NASA Explore Earth, 2020]] ; [[#NASA/JPL-Caltech--2020|NASA/JPL-Caltech, 2020]] ). These events continue to unveil unresolved conditions of social vulnerability and its root causes in economic poverty, social inequities, aged and deteriorating infrastructure, and population loss ( [[#Bonilla--2019|Bonilla and LeBrón, 2019]] ). Combined with limited past investment in climate change adaptation and underlying governance challenges including corruption, bankruptcy and political crisis (Holladay et al., 2019), this has constrained a more CRD for Puerto Rico.

It is in this context that government, academic institutions and local civil society have taken important steps and often joint action toward mitigation and adaptation. Federal funding included USD 20 billion of disaster recovery funding with USD 8 billion allocated for adaptation and resilience projects, such as flood risk mitigation. During the year 2020, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) approved USD 13 billion to rebuild the power grid and education system ( [[#Delgado--2020|Delgado, 2020]] ). These programmes allow communities and local governments to plan and implement strategies and build new infrastructure that reduces risks and builds long-term adaptive capacities. The Government of Puerto Rico also approved two key climate adaptation policies in 2019. The Puerto Rico Mitigation, Adaptation and Resilience to Climate Change Law (Law 33, Senate Bill PS 773) established, for the first time in the island’s history, a legal framework that acknowledges that the climate is changing and threatens the quality of life. The law recognises important scientific projections for the island, including an increase of 0.5 to 1 m in sea levels by 2015, maximum temperatures of up 2.5°C and precipitation decrease of up to 50% by 2100 (Gould et al., 2018). The law generated the formation of an Expert and Advisory Committee on Climate Change to develop the plan with specific recommendations and present it to the Legislature within a year of the passing of the law in 2020. Along with strategies to specifically protect and build the resilience of urban and rural communities to future climate disasters, the law establishes SDGs, including water and food security, urban planning and densification, and transition to renewable and alternative forms of energy. The energy target is reinforced by another key state policy approved in 2019 in response to the failed energy infrastructure during Hurricane María, the Puerto Rico Energy Public Policy Act (Senate Bill PS 1121). This law calls for a transition to 100% renewable and alternative energy by 2050.

Puerto Rico has a strong science base that produced extensive knowledge on climate change and sustainability long before Hurricane María. The Puerto Rico Climate Change Council has collected and synthesised scientific information for Puerto Rico since before its formation in 2009. Many Puerto Rican scientists were also editors and authors on Chapter 20: US Caribbean Region for 4th US National Climate Assessment (Gould et al., 2018). The National Institute of Island Energy and Sustainability (INESI in Spanish) recently published a catalogue with more than 60 scientists and experts working on energy and sustainability innovations in the University of Puerto Rico (UPR) system. The scientific community became very active after the hurricane in efforts to empower local groups and communities to build more sustainable and resilient futures. UPR environmental health scientists worked with communities to design and implement risk reduction action plans, including NBS , through the Community Climate Actions Plans and the Puerto Rico Community Resiliency Initiative sponsored by Fundación Comunitaria de Puerto Rico and Education Development Center-Regional Education Laboratories, Northeast and Islands. A successful example of these alliances is the development of the first solar power community in Toro Negro, Puerto Rico. These initiatives were inspired by principles of human-centred design, a problem-solving approach that starts with the people impacted the most by the problem to be solved. In San Juan, the capital and major urban centre of the island, scientists from UPR and the US Forest Service International Institute of Tropical Forestry worked with local stakeholders and communities to develop sustainable and transformative urban futures with the support of the Urban Resilience to Extreme Events Sustainability Research Network (UREx SRN). The UREx SRN is a knowledge network of 10 cities in the USA and Latin America and 20 other institutions building scientific knowledge, models and participatory tools to build resilience and transformative capacities for cities.

Perhaps the greatest source of adaptive capacity that emerged after the hurricane came from the civic sector and community-based organisations, and local residents. Hundreds of non-profit and grassroots organisations became active in disaster recovery and are now catalysing actions to advance social transformation and sustainable development. In the energy sector, numerous communities and NGOs developed new action plans to promote transitions to renewable energy and community-based microgrids, such as the Queremos Sol initiative ( https://www.queremossolpr.com/ ), and the establishment of solar panels in community centres and residences by the Puerto Rico Community Foundation and Resilient Power Puerto Rico. The San Juan Bay Estuary Program, an NGO in the San Juan metropolitan area, launched alongside the Clinton Global Initiative the development of a watershed-based multi-jusrisdictional hazard mitigation plan, the first watershed-based plan for the metro region. The organisation has established resilience hubs to support the community with critical resources, communications and energy supply during an emergency. In many of the most isolated areas across the island where government aid did not reach them for months, the communities that self-organised during recovery are also leading examples of community social–ecological resilience. In Utuado, one of the hardest hit areas by the hurricane, their main community organisation known as COSSAO (Corporación de Servicios de Salud y Desarrollo Socioeconómico, El Otoao) emerged from the hurricane with a strong and holistic sustainable development vision, the Tetuan Reborn initiative, to improve the socioeconomic status and health of community members while building capacity for disaster resilience through various initiatives. The long-term outcome of this initiative is to support efforts toward self-empowerment within neighbourhoods by identifying and designing viable solutions to hurricane-related and economic development challenges specific to the local context, including constructing a primary health care clinic, a public health promoter programme, pursuing farms rehabilitation, and promoting agritourism, agrotherapy and education (Holladay et al., 2019).

Adaptation efforts, however, continue to face many governance hurdles. Up to 2020, only 2–3% of the USD 20 million Federal Government recovery funds had been spent with hundreds of families that lost their homes or roofs in 2017 yet to receive the help they need ( [[#Colón%20Almenas--2020|Colón Almenas, 2020]] ). Lack of administrative capacities, coordination across sectors and efforts, transparency and accountability are some of the governance barriers that keep recovery and transformation efforts from materialising ( [[#Lamba%20Nieves--2020|Lamba Nieves and Marxuach, 2020]] ). Puerto Ricans are now contending with the reality that the disaster they are experiencing is not an outcome of a singular event but of multiple hazards converging with pre-existing vulnerabilities and low adaptive capacities creating severe multi-hazard risk to the island (Eakin, Muñoz-Erickson and Lemos, 2018; Gould et al., 2018). Many Puerto Ricans now question when the disaster began and when it ended because they have been living in a state of chronic crisis ( [[#Bonilla--2019|Bonilla and LeBrón, 2019]] ).

<span id="case-study-6.5-climate-resilient-pathways-in-informal-settlements-in-cities-in-sub-saharan-africa"></span>