Understanding Urban Adaptation Policy and Social Justice: A New Conceptual Framework for Just-Oriented Adaptation Policies

Climate change poses one of the most urgent challenges for cities today, creating unprecedented risks for individuals, communities, and various types of infrastructure—social, spatial, and physical. In response, many cities have begun developing and implementing adaptation policies aimed at enhancing their resilience and sustainability. This paper raises an important question about the fairness of these emerging policies and plans: how are adaptation policies and their practical measures distributed equitably among different urban areas, and how do they affect social, racial, ethnic, and other marginalized groups? However, the existing literature on urban adaptation measures is fragmented across various fields of knowledge. There is a notable lack of a cohesive conceptual framework that integrates these adaptation measures. This absence hinders our understanding of the social dimensions of these policies and their equitable distribution among diverse urban groups and neighborhoods, especially when many of them are implemented simultaneously. This paper aims to analyze the socially just aspects of urban adaptation measures and to explore their impact on socially, demographically, ethnically, and gender-diverse populations and groups. The central argument of this paper is that adaptation policies and their associated measures are not merely tools for implementation; rather, adaptation measures serve as significant carriers of social justice. This paper reviews multidisciplinary climate change adaptation policies and measures at the city scale. This analytical review is grounded in Jabareen’s multidisciplinary theory for building a conceptual framework. The analysis yields a new conceptual framework, which we refer to as the Conceptual Framework for Just-Oriented Adaptation Policies. This framework consists of six interconnected concepts of adaptation, with each concept encompassing various measures that collectively contribute to specific aspects of social justice. At the core of this framework lies the ontological concept of defensibility, which underpins adaptation policies aimed at protecting people and urban systems while enhancing the resilience of cities.