Deliberative Economic Valuation Methods to Assess the Effects of Climate Change on Urban Infrastructures

Consequences of climate change have social, economic and environmental effects. Changes in weather patterns directly impact to transport infrastructures, which play a strategic role in emergency management. Calamitous events as consequence of weather and climatic processes raise the need to foresee adaptation measures to climate change, which is already in place. Although there is a large literature on the effects of climate change, individual and collective responses and behaviours are unclear to such changes. Infrastructures are urban community goods, so adaptation actions concern values and preferences that affect the community itself. In order to measure these values, it is appropriate to consider the impacts (understood as the interpretation of the effects) perceived by communities, but most of the conventional evaluation approaches show obvious limitations. The paper proposes to use inclusive processes, based on the theory of deliberative democracy, in the economic judgments of value and choice in the field of climate change and the adaptation measures related to urban infrastructures. Given the series of effects climate change generates on a single infrastructure and the related adaptation measures, the procedures proposed in this paper enable the members of the community involved to: a) appraise the Shared Economic Value (SEV) of the impact produced by climate change and the related adaptation measures; b) to obtain a Shared Multi-criteria Judgment of alternative adaptation measures.