Project Summary
Despite California’s progress in climate risk management in the last decade, within the air transportation sector specifically, airport adaptation has lagged behind mitigation-focused efforts (emissions reduction) due to their better structured policies and quantifiable standards. Not solely determined by current infrastructure design standards for projected climate hazards, airport adaptation strategies also rely on institutional and societal interactions and decision-making processes that create, reinforce and transform these rules. This project aims therefore to benchmark airport climate adaptation governance to better understand the rights, rules, principles and decision-making procedures that give rise to airport climate adaptation practices in California. We propose a systematic review of constitutive and operational policies in the nexus of airport safety and environmental management to: (1) trace the genealogy of airport climate adaptation policies and (2) map institutional stakeholders of airport climate risk governance. Our methods involve a policy genealogy, structured interviews, and an assessment of airport exposure to different scenarios of coastal flooding based on the data made available by California’s 4th Climate Change Assessment. Our goal is to benchmark the current airport climate adaptation regime in California and uncover institutional and organizational agency to address the challenges of expected effects of climate change.
