Damages to buildings from pluvial flooding pose key risks to cities, impacting both economy and health, and drawing increased policy attention. While Swedish buildings are known to be at risk, most research focuses on homeowners and flood exposure. Despite municipal property companies owning a quarter of all apartments in Sweden, less is known about their buildings' risk and adaptation actions. This study addresses this gap by investigating: What do property company staff view as severe pluvial flood impacts? Which building characteristics contribute to pluvial flood risk, particularly severe impacts? What adaptation actions can property companies implement to reduce severe flood impact risk? The study involves collaboration with four Swedish municipal property companies, mapping 2,358 buildings, inspecting 604 buildings, and conducting nine expert workshops. The study suggests a severe impacts approach to guide adaptation to pluvial floods, reducing impacts on: Human lives or health, Critical operations, Evacuation, Critical technical installations, and High-value loss and damage. The study identifies a set of scalable property-level adaptation actions to reduce severe impacts and a typology of adaptation actions, emphasizing property owner responsibility and ability to act. Implementing the severe impacts approach, the typology and scalable actions will increase property companies' capacity to adapt.

Floods are the most common natural hazards causing disasters, with more than 3200 recorded events during the period 2000–2019. Due to projected and already observed effects of the climate change phenomena, the frequency and magnitude of extreme weather events are likely to increase, which will subsequently increase the occurrence of major flooding events. This will lead to challenges for the actors tasked with rescuing and protecting people and property from the floods. These actors need to determine which properties and infrastructure to protect to maintain critical societal services or to mitigate cascading hazards. This paper investigates the potential of a decision support tool for allocating resources for the protection of critical societal services during floods. It contributes to the literature on flood protection management by presenting a novel approach to the problem. The tool is centered around an integer programming model with input data based on flood level projections. Both quantitative and qualitative data collection methods were applied, involving professionals and experts from the domain studied. The allocations determined by the model in 320 instances of the problem were compared to reactive base case allocations. The results indicate that the model outperforms a reactive allocation approach, even when acting on uncertain information. The tool showed good potential in its ability to increase the task effectiveness and enhance the user performance. One of the conclusions is that proactive protection planning is better than reactive, since it enables protection of the most valuable critical services

Progressing with climate adaptation in dense urban built environments has proved challenging. Making adaptation multifunctional has been proposed as a promising approach, allowing effective use of limited urban space by simultaneously meeting important societal needs. However, there is still uncertainty about the extent to which multifunctionality is actively planned, designed, and implemented in urban areas and what factors influence implementation uptake. This paper analytically unpacks the practice and prospects of multifunctional adaptation in urban built environments, illustrating empirical lessons from ten Swedish cities. We conclude that multifunctional adaptation in practical examples tends to focus more on manifesting and effectively using existing green space for multiple functions instead of undoing and transforming traditional grey urban environments to enhance greening and adding new green qualities in the urban landscape. Moreover, city size proves important when considering both motivations and implementation uptake. Larger cities motivate multifunctional adaptation by political expectations and lack of available space, whereas in smaller cities motivations include their contribution to urban attractiveness and public acceptance of adaptation measures. Many factors identified in previous studies as influencing implementation uptake also prove valid for multifunctional urban built environment adaptation. However, there is evidence of substantial size-related differences in the analysis, with some factors being more manageable in smaller and others in larger cities. This suggests the importance of analytically distinguishing city size for the sake of research accuracy, policy evaluation and design, to be able to make the most of ongoing multifunctional adaptation in dense and complex urban built environments.

Climate change and urban development patterns amplify the risks of flooding and water pollution. While climate-robust stormwater management has the potential to reduce these risks, its implementation remains slow. Enhanced and new forms of collaboration between municipalities and property owners are proposed as the keys to advancing the volume and effectiveness of such measures. However, the practical outline of new collaborative practices between these actor categories within existing built urban environments is still in its early stages. This study uses the experiences and visions of respondents from eleven municipalities and six property companies in Sweden to start examining the challenges, needs, and requirements for such forms of collaboration. The study identifies current challenges, including ambiguous legislation, organizational differences, unclear roles and responsibilities, and weak economic incentives. Requirements for improved collaboration opportunities include overcoming perceived legal obstacles, assigning collaboration coordinators, establishing long-term collaborative forums, and clarifying financial principles and cost-sharing arrangements. Creating the conditions for collaboration thus requires changes in formal national frameworks, as well as changes in local organizational structures, norms, and traditions.

Denna slutrapport från EMMUNE-projektet fokuserar på hur kunskap ominteraktioner mellan naturhändelser kan användas för att förbättra beredskap ochrespons i det svenska räddningssystemet. Projektet pågick mellan 2019 och 2025 ochfinansierades av MSB och Formas. Det omfattar fyra delstudier.Den första delstudien utvecklade ett nationellt ramverk för att identifiera och klassificerainteraktioner mellan naturhändelser i Sverige. Genom analys av litteratur, myndighetsdata ochexpertworkshops identifierades 77 parvisa interaktioner, särskilt kopplade till värmeböljor, kraftig nederbörd, översvämningar och skogsbränder. Dessa interaktioner kategoriseradesenligt ett ramverk som inkluderar kaskadeffekter, förändrad predisposition, ökad risk ochsamtidiga utbrott.Den andra delstudien analyserade behovet av beslutsstöd för hantering av denna typ avhändelser, genom intervjuer med aktörer som räddningstjänst, MSB och länsstyrelser. Medhjälp av aktivitetsteori identifierades 13 motsättningar i planerings- och beslutsaktiviteter,vilket tydliggjorde behovet av beslutsstödsverktyg för resursplanering och hantering avkomplexa händelser.De två avslutande delstudierna utvecklade och testade datorbaserade beslutsstödsverktyg. Detförsta verktyget optimerar placeringen av flygande brandbekämpningsresurser baserat påbrandriskprognoser. Det andra fördelar resurser för översvämningsskydd utifrån samhällsvärdeoch prognosdata. Båda verktygen visade god prestanda och användbarhet i simuleringar ochutvärderingar med slutanvändare.Rapporten bidrar både vetenskapligt och praktiskt genom att kombinera klimatrelateradriskforskning med konkret utveckling av beslutsstöd. Den visar hur evidensbaserad kunskapom naturhändelsers interaktioner kan operationaliseras i verktyg som stärker samhälletsförmåga att hantera framtida klimatrelaterade kriser.

Pluvial floods are increasingly affecting urban areas worldwide. Despite growing media attention and clear owner responsibility for reducing climate-related risk for buildings in Swedish national adaptation policy, adaptation action remains slow. Understanding how different property owner categories view and act on flood risks is key for developing better incentive structures and support for accelerating adaptation action. While tenant-owned housing is a common form of housing tenure in Sweden, studies are lacking. This study enhances understanding of pluvial flood risk and adaptation views and actions by tenant-owned housing associations in two Swedish cities. It is based on assessments of 69 apartment buildings within eleven tenant-owned associations and semi-structured interviews with their eleven chairpersons. The study indicates that tenant-owned associations grossly underestimate their flood risks and responsibilities for climate adaptation, even though many buildings studied are at significant risk, and most associations have been impacted by floods, some severely and recurrently. The patronization of flood risk and responsibility for adaptation is attributed to several factors: underestimating risks and consequences, devaluing the benefit of one’s own adaptation actions, lacking knowledge about climate adaptation measures for buildings, and (overly) generous insurance terms. The findings confirm low adaptation action among housing associations, even those with recurring floods, which is concerning given the strong reliance on property-owner adaptation in national adaptation policy.

Climate-related risks, vulnerabilities, and impacts are increasing in cities, illustrated by precipitation-driven pluvial floods. Post-event analyses can aid in reducing urban flood risks, but knowledge gaps exist regarding how welfare services and premises are impacted and can be adapted. This study analyses an extreme precipitation-driven event generating extensive flooding in Gavle, Sweden, in 2021. The objective is to increase knowledge about how municipal welfare services are vulnerable to pluvial floods, and of appropriate actions towards improving the response capacity and building more resilient welfare premises and operations. The study shows that the Swedish weather warning system generally worked well, but the analysed property companies lacked strategies and equipment to evade flooding in their properties. Flood damages in 60 analysed buildings were generated by different causes, demonstrating the importance of contemplating the vulnerability of welfare buildings when conducting flood risk assessments. Although the flood event did not generate deaths or serious personal injuries, the study identified impacts on welfare service operations in both the short and long terms. The event increased learning on climate adaptation but did not trigger adaptive action. Identified keys for adaptation include prioritizing premises to protect, knowledge of flood protection equipment, insurance company requirements, and updated emergency plans.

While climate adaptation planning and implementation is gradually increasing across the globe, there is a documented gap between what is done and what needs to be done. Researchers have documented climate adaptation efforts at the strategic policy-making level and in urban planning practices, but less is known about how cities navigate the intricacies of climate adaptation policy-progression in the existing built environment. Contributing to the analytical unpacking of how to reduce policy implementation gaps, this paper targets ten Swedish early adopter cities seeking to proactively and pragmatically progress with their climate adaptation efforts from policy-formation to implementation in the urban built environment. Qualitative analyses of interviews and policy-documents illustrate that the cities, despite their early adopter status, struggle with stepwise policy-progression and get stuck when approaching implementation. Ensuring appropriate climate adaptation in the existing urban built environment becomes problematic due to current legal distribution of responsibilities, diverse land-ownership patterns and path-dependent structures and configurations within cities that are dense, intricate and tightly developed over of time. We identify three pragmatic action-strategies adopted to create solution space and allowing the cities to proceed: event-driven, target-driven and opportunity-driven climate adaptation, each having their advantages and disadvantages for ensuring urban robustness, as well as different requirements for up-scaling. The analysis enables important lessons of climate adaptation policy-progression, the promise and pitfalls of stepwise adaptation and the necessity of pragmatic muddling that is required to make climate adaptation work in the existing urban built environment.

Klimatförändringar leder till ökade och nya risker i samhällen. Översvämningar från skyfall är en sådan risk som redan genererar stora skador, vilka förväntas öka markant i framtiden. Inte minst riskerar många villaägare att drabbas av översvämningar och de har också tillskrivits en central roll i Sveriges klimatanpassningsarbete. Trots detta har inga tidigare svenska studier undersökt specifikt hur villaägare påverkats av översvämningar bortom skadekostnader och ytterst få har undersökt hur de har hanterat eller ser på sitt ansvar att förebygga översvämningsrisker. Bristen på sådan kunskap kan leda till mindre informerade beslut om klimatanpassning. Genom intervjuer med villaägare som drabbats av översvämningar undersöker denna studie hur villaägare; ser på översvämningsrisker, har påverkats materiellt och hälsomässigt, har hanterat situationen, och ser på ansvar att förebygga nya skador. Studien påvisar tydliga effekter på villaägares välbefinnande, att få villaägare har implementerat åtgärder, tendenser att underskatta risker för översvämningar samt att ansvaret för förebyggande åtgärder skjuts över till andra aktörer.

Recent multiple natural hazards and compound climate events studies have identified a range of interaction types and examined natural hazard interactions in various locations. Yet, there are calls for examining relevant multiple natural hazards in still unstudied national contexts as Sweden. Moreover, multi-hazard concepts rarely consider climate change effects, despite the call of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to adopt multi-hazard approaches and the growing recognition that compound events should be considered "normal". Using a systematic literature study, the paper presents a national natural hazard interaction framework for Sweden identifying 39 cascading, 56 disposition alteration, 3 additional hazard potential, and 17 coincident triggering interactions between 20 natural hazards. Reviewed gray literature, an expert workshop, and reviewed climate research suggest increases of multiple natural hazards with heat wave and heavy rain as triggering or driving events and with hydrological hazards, for instance, fluvial floods, landslides, and debris flows, as the main consequences.

Objectives: Heatwaves are having a disproportionate impact on the elderly population, as demonstrated by pronounced mortality and morbidity. The present study aimed to explore elders’ subjective experiences of heat impacts and adaptive strategies. Methods: Semi-structured interviews with 19 elderly Swedes were conducted, focusing on their experiences of the extremely hot summer of 2018. Results: Most informants suffered during the heatwave, although some found it pleasant. The readiness to implement adaptive measures was generally high among the healthiest, who were able to avoid excessive heat and adjust their daily routines. In contrast, those highly dependent on care from others had limited options for avoiding the heat, and little capacity to take up adaptive measures. Discussion: With heat becoming an increasing problem, it is important to adjust elderly care so that the most vulnerable elderly people can avoid excessive heat exposure.

Transformative adaptation is described as decisive to mitigating risks and to seizing opportunities from a changing climate, requiring new ways of governing, planning and collaborating, alongside technical innovations. Building municipal capacities for citizen participation in adaptation is important to enabling such transformational changes but remains challenging. By applying capacities distilled from the literature on Urban Transformative Capacity and Participatory Climate Governance in a Swedish municipal case, this study aims to disentangle key limits for, and innovations to strengthen, local capacities for citizen participation in transformative climate adaptation. Interviews with municipal officials, focus groups with citizens, and document analyses were employed to analyse how climate adaptation and citizen participation are governed, and how these policy areas are interacting and could be bridged. The study points at conditions that foremost prevent bridging established policies and practices on adaptation and citizen participation, stemming from the different logics and distribution of responsibility within, and lacking collaboration between, these separated policy areas. The analysis concludes that potential ways to enable citizen participation in adaptation involve: broadening the geographical boundaries of deliberations; redefining the target groups for participation; co-designing participation targets, approaches and evaluation; and developing new ways to analyse and act on the patterns in the citizen inputs received.

With climate change already underway, cities are looking for ways to deal with its effects. To balance urban waterfront development and climate adaptation, floating housing is presented as a promising solution—however it has not been studied sufficiently. This paper explores floating housing as urban climate experimentation, targeting vision/motivation, practice and upscaling in a national context where support mechanisms and traditions are absent. Interviews with innovation entrepreneurs and municipal planners involved with planning and building floating districts show that, with one exception, the Swedish initiatives are at odds with the theoretical assumptions behind urban climate experimentation. Initiatives are neither challenge-led in terms of climate risk nor inclusive and community-based. Rather, the small-scale private entrepreneurs are pioneers in offering unique living on water as one-off innovations. While allowing experimentation, municipal planners are less convinced by the effectiveness and appropriateness of upscaling. Floating housing may contribute to local identity building and place marketing, but are riddled with implementation challenges regarding shoreline protection, privatization/accessibility, limited market interest and urban development fit. While the floating houses themselves withstand flooding, thus safeguarding individual house owners, they do not protect the land-based city with its vulnerable waterfront development patterns. Results thus suggest the limitation of floating houses in shifting development pathways and strengthening urban climate proofing.

With global warming, heat waves are becoming more frequent and intense, particularly in northern latitudes, where the pace of warming is faster. Due to its northern location, Swedish society has been built primarily to manage a cold climate, and is less prepared to manage heat, which the 2018 heat wave demonstrated. While young children are recognized as vulnerable to heat, and are reliant on preschool care, few studies have examined how the young and vulnerable people are cared for during heat waves in the institutional preschool setting. This exploratory study demonstrates how children in preschool environments are vulnerable to heat, in order to identify management needs by assessing experienced impacts and responses to the 2018 heat wave in Sweden. Empirically, the study builds on a survey completed by 33 unit heads responsible for 77 preschools in the focused municipality, and qualitative interviews with five educators and five parents, as well as temperature measurements in three selected preschools. This study shows that: (i) children and educators are exposed to both high indoor and outdoor temperatures in the preschools; (ii) both children and educators were affected by the heat wave in the preschools, and their sensitivity is deeply intertwined due to their dependency relationship, rendering a form of double sensitivity to heat; and (iii) the preschool heads and educators were unprepared to sufficiently cope with the heat wave, and organizational strategies for managing heat were lacking, indicating weak adaptive capacity. The significant exposure to heat in preschool environments, the dual sensitivity of children and preschool educators, and the low organizational readiness resulting in uncoordinated responses to reduce heat stress suggest a pronounced vulnerability to heat waves in preschools.

Climate-proofing coastal cities is an important part of the current policy agenda for climate adaptation, particularly in a situation where waterfront redevelopment is accelerating. Cities call for innovative approaches integrating climate protection with urban attractiveness and waterfront endeavors. There is a lack of studies targeting policy processes for coastal protection, including the choice of adaptation strategies and impediments for implementation. Sweden is an interesting case due to the decentralized character of coastal adaptation. Consequently, this paper aims to analyze the status of and conditions for large-scale multifunctional coastal protection by means of qualitative analyses of policy documents and interviews with frontline practitioners in four Swedish coastal cities: Malmö, Gothenburg, Helsingborg and Landskrona. The analysis documents a predominant focus on envisioning/planning for coastal protection rather than implementation of adaptation measures. While waterfront development functions as a window of opportunity in the more populous cities it also risks creating fragmentation and social imbalances in coastal protection between cities and their various coastal areas. Key implementation determinants emphasize formal institutional aspects, where politics and political decision-making need to set the necessary terms ensuring implementation. Current public-private and national-local distribution of responsibilities, stepwise planning and limited funding-mechanisms create uncertainties in system robustness and coherency. The consequences of a system for coastal protection heavily reliant on decentralized action needs to be properly considered by adaptation policy-makers.

Climate change and urban densification pose major challenges to the built environment. In Swedish cities, fluvial and pluvial floods risk being aggravated, necessitating adaptation efforts to make the build environment more resilient. A recent governmental inquiry states that owners are primarily responsible for adapting their property, and that the existing built environment is particularly tricky. Property owners often lack tools and approaches to strategically adapt to climate risks. This paper presents and tests a structured approach intended for large property owners to assess and visualize flood vulnerability in both individual buildings and the property portfolio, and organizational adaptive responses. The approach was developed and tested using the municipal housing company Hyresbostäder in Norrköping, Sweden as case. The study builds on workshops with staff, a systematic flood vulnerability mapping of 575 buildings, and in-situ inspections of the 85 most vulnerable buildings. The vulnerability and need for adaptation of individual buildings were visualized on a map, and adaptive avenues were identified. The approach was found useful for identifying the most vulnerable buildings, concrete adaptation measures and five broad adaptation avenues: risk-focused adaptation investments, area-focused adaptation, regular inspection and maintenance, informed collaboration and tenant dialogues. The property owner’s transformative capacity was improved by creating a shared vision, empowerment and learning, innovation capacity, gaining overview supporting transformative leadership and external cooperation likely to contribute to meeting SDGs 13 and 11. In further studies the approach will be tested by other large property owners under limited research support.

As local climate adaptation activity increases, so does the number of questions about costs, benefits, financing and the role that economic considerations play in adaptation-related decision-making and policy. Through five cases, covering a range of climate risks and types of adaptation measures, this paper critically examines Swedish project coordinators' perceptions of costs and benefits in already-implemented climate adaptation measures. Our study finds that project coordinators make use of different system boundaries - on temporal, geographical and administrative scales - in their cost/benefit evaluations, making the practice of determining adaptation costs arbitrary and hard to compare. We further demonstrate that the project coordinators interpret costs and benefits in a manner that downplays the intangible environmental and social costs and benefits arising from the adaptation measures, despite their own experience of how such measures negatively impact upon social value. The exclusion of social and environmental costs and benefits has severe implications for justice, as it can bias decisions against people and ecosystems that are affected negatively. Based on the findings, we propose three tentative social justice dilemmas in local climate adaptation planning and implementation: 1. Cost and benefit distribution across scales; 2. The identification and valuation of non-market effects; and 3. The equitable allocation of costs and benefits.

Citizen participation is obligated in municipal planning but is often criticized because of its inadequate implementation. To increase the usefulness of citizen participation and the involvement of underrepresented groups, online participatory tools (OPTs) have attracted attention, in particular, on topics related to climate change. Although many OPTs have been developed and are becoming more widely used, assessments of their usefulness in real-world planning remain scarce. This study aimed to disentangle prospects and pitfalls of this still novel way of practicing citizen dialogue. Specifically, we apply criteria derived from related literatures to assess a mainstreamed OPT in Norrköping, Sweden. The CityPlanner™ tool was discussed with citizens and planners using focus group methodology and semi-structured individual interviews. Moreover, citizen contributions in four applications of the OPT were analyzed. The results reveal that the biggest challenges for citizen dialogues on planning in general and on climate change, in particular, appear not mainly rooted in the technical functions of the OPT. Rather, problems lie in (i) the lack of municipal strategy for citizen participation and in applying OPTs, (ii) a disparagement in citizens’ abilities to contribute to forming robust and sustainable cities, and (iii) in diverging views about the role of citizen contributions. This is reflected in how the OPT is used. While the examined OPT shows potential, the results indicate that visualized contexts for planning might be too scant to be entirely meaningful, and it lacks mechanisms for feedback. Not using the full potential of the OPT makes citizens less engaged and risks to adversely affect learning and citizens’ contributions to solving complex issues.

Municipal actors are increasingly expected to consider climate adaptation in operative and strategic work. Here, digital environments can support strategic decisions and planning through visual representations of local climate risks and vulnerabilities. This study targets visualization of vulnerability to heat and floods as a means of supporting adaptation action in preschools, primary schools, caring units, and municipal residential buildings in Norrköping, Sweden. Workshops with sector leaders identified vulnerability indicators used as a basis for collecting, calculating and representing self-assessed vulnerability of individual units and buildings. Informed by user inputs, a map-based interactive visual tool representing resulting vulnerability scores and risk maps was developed to support (1) planners and sector leaders in strategic prioritization and investments, and (2) unit heads in identifying adaptation measures to reduce local flood and heat risks. The tool was tested with adaptation coordinators from targeted sectors. The study finds that the tool made it possible to overview climate risks and adaptation measures, which arguably increases general governance capacity Allowing yearly updates of set scores, the tool was also found to be useful for monitoring how vulnerability in the municipality evolves over time, and for evaluating how adaptive efforts influence calculated risks.