Capacidade adaptativa às mudanças climáticas: uma análise das regiões metropolitanas de João Pessoa-PB e de Natal-RN no nordeste do Brasil

Abstract

The central themes of the work are structured around three main axes: cities, climate change and adaptive capacity. The discussion starts from the scenario of the global climate crisis, presenting adaptive capacity as the ability to adapt to climate phenomena, seeking to reduce their impacts. In this scenario, cities and urban agglomerations are strategic aspects of action, due to the fact that the largest portion of the population settles in urban spaces. Actions to combat climate change require contextualized information, but each spatial section has its own dynamics and characteristics. In this sense, the problem of the research focuses on the difficulty in identifying generalizations of characteristics capable of influencing adaptive capacity. Through the application of indexes, the research seeks to identify the levels of adaptive capacity of two metropolitan regions that have similar urban-regional dynamics, João Pessoa (RMJP) and Natal (RMN). The methodology of the work has a quantitative approach, with an applied nature, using exploratory research and observation of phenomena through case studies. The methodological procedures are divided into four stages: bibliographic review; characterization of the study scope; measurement by adaptive capacity indexes; and analysis of results. The results demonstrate that there is still a low insertion of adaptive capacity in the metropolitan regions analyzed, especially with regard to adaptation policies. It was also observed that urbanregional similarities may be related to adaptive capacity, such as the spatial distribution of results according to the geographic distance of cities, but with the need to observe specific categories of analysis. Among the main conclusions, there is a need to improve instruments for assessing adaptive capacity, related both to consolidated databases and to the construction of more consistent indexes that approximate the reality of the context analyzed.