From the 2030 Agenda of the Metropolitan City of Milan to Municipal Urban Planning Documents (DUP) through shared climate change adaptation indicators and targets.
Strategic Vision (for Policy Makers)
Five steps to integrate climate change adaptation into Single Programming Documents and Municipal Plans, ensuring access to dedicated funding:
Operating practice (for managers and technicians)
1. Identify the DUP Adaptation Target from existing interventions
2. Determine the appropriate Indicators and collect the data to populate them
3. Calculate the rate of progress of an Indicator in the direction of Adaptation
4. Assess the level of progress in achieving the DUP Objective through the DASHBOARDS
Strategic vision
1. Identify Existing Adaptation Measures in Planning Documents
Municipal administrations often implement actions related to climate change adaptation (e.g., energy efficiency, stormwater management, urban greening) without full awareness. The first step is to recognize and leverage these interventions as part of a structured adaptation strategy.
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Damage to people, property, infrastructure, and services is becoming increasingly frequent and severe in our territories.
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Climate adaptation actions, aimed at restoring and rehabilitating land, enabling sustainable transformation of local economies, and minimizing impacts, are concretely implemented at the local level.
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Municipalities often fail to structure their interventions in energy, urban planning, social sectors, etc., as integrated, interconnected actions targeting multiple objectives. Yet these very characteristics—essential for climate adaptation measures—represent a winning and necessary approach to future challenges. Here some examples.
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Without structured governance, responses to damage and disruptions risk being fragmented, emergency-driven, and lacking long-term vision. It is therefore crucial for municipalities to adopt an integrated and strategic approach to climate adaptation, incorporating it into territorial planning, programming, and management processes.
2. Make Adaptation Objectives Explicit in the Single Programming Documents
Defining and integrating measurable climate adaptation objectives into DUPs is an essential measure to make adaptation a key component of municipal strategic planning.
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The clarification is the first operational measure of Adaptation, pertaining to the sphere of Governance of the Local Authority or rather it expresses its awareness and decision-making capacity
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The objectives included in the DUP are operationally expressed in terms of missions, performance, incentives and budget items
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The inclusion in the DUP allows the vision and coordinated planning from above of interventions pertaining to different sectors of the municipal machine, accustomed to operating independently from each other in terms of themes, practices, parameters and reference legislation.
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Local adaptation actions, being of a “horizontal” nature (as indicated in point 1.3), concern and operationally involve multiple sectors of the municipal administration. It is therefore essential that such actions are monitored and reported in a comprehensive manner, adopting a strategic vision that goes beyond sectoral competences, or through the performance of the Objectives defined in the DUP that express and concretize such actions.
3. Define priority adaptation objectives for the local territory
The three-year strategic plan for the metropolitan territory (PSTTM) constitutes a guideline for the metropolitan city and for the exercise of the functions of its municipalities through the coordination of the overall government action of the local administrations of the metropolitan territory, configuring the scenarios and general objectives of long-term development of the metropolitan community and the related conditions of economic-social and territorial-environmental sustainability.
The PSTTM is a reference framework for building agreements between CMM and Municipalities to implement, as in this case, climate change adaptation policies. The PSTTM entrusts the Single Programming Document with the task of ensuring operational coherence between the different programming tools of the Metropolitan City and, at the same time, of carrying out adequate monitoring of the implementation of the Plan itself.
The Municipality that intends to define its objectives must therefore refer, in the first instance and with a view to policy coherence, to the reference PSTTM, verifying what has already been outlined.
Secondly, it will have to identify strategic objectives for adaptation to the climate crisis specific to its community that will allow the Municipality to focus interventions on crucial aspects, helping to address and reduce impacts on the territory. In the context of the Milan metropolitan area , the main priority objectives have been identified, accompanied by related interventions, which represent a guide to address local climate challenges.
4. Visualize progress in achieving the DUP Objective through a Monitoring, Reporting and Evaluation (MRV) system
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The MRV system, implemented in the IndicaMi project, allows for an initial monitoring of the direction and speed of the degree of progress in the path undertaken with a DUP strategic objective of adaptation to the climate crisis.
The results obtained from the set of interventions carried out in the municipal territory, through quantitative indicators relating to the specific theme, are displayed through dedicated DASHBOARDS (one for each Objective) which provide a synthetic and immediate representation of the progress achieved.
5. Align with Supralocal Plans & Secure Adaptation Funding
The monitoring and quantitative reporting phase of the Goals is crucial to evaluate the effectiveness of the set of actions undertaken. This approach, now required to access public and private funding , allows to demonstrate the results achieved in terms of resilience and sustainability and to plan the necessary further steps: Adaptation is an iterative process.
The MONITORING of adaptation interventions to the climate crisis BY MUNICIPALITIES is a recurring theme in the strategic National and Regional Plans
Public and private funding for local actions and projects to adapt to the climate crisis is conditional on the explicit presence of adaptation objectives in the DUPs or implicitly presupposes them.
Operating practice (for managers and technicians)
1. Identify the DUP Adaptation Target from existing interventions
Many of the interventions carried out or about to be carried out in the Milan area can be divided according to strategic objectives explicitly aimed at adaptation previously defined in the Single Programming Documents (DUP).
In line with the DPSIR logical model, infographics (ita) are available with examples of interventions , considered as RESPONSES, and implementing adaptation strategies for the reduction of IMPACTS due to climate change. The DPSIR scheme is proposed for each DUP Objective.
2. Determine the appropriate Indicators and collect the data to populate them
The effectiveness of interventions carried out on the territory can be monitored with the help of certain indicators that describe the context (STATUS), the relative changes over time and the extent of the IMPACTS resulting from the ongoing climate crisis.
In general, an indicator can be:
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Without quantitative threshold (or without benchmark), to evaluate the overall trend of improvement or worsening. Most of the indicators taken into consideration in the IndicaMi project do not have benchmarks;
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With quantitative threshold (or with benchmark), to verify the achievement of a reference value that is normative, technical or voluntary. An example of an indicator with benchmark is land consumption with a threshold defined by the PTM on the basis of data referring to 2006.
The IndicaMi project provides a DB of indicators useful for monitoring the degree of adaptation for each municipality. The file consists of two sheets organized as follows:
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“INDICATORS” sheet: which lists examples of parameters relevant to monitoring adaptation activity, broken down according to the PSIR logical model ;
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“DASHBOARD INDICATORS” sheet: containing specific indicators divided for calculating the progress with respect to each DUP Objective.
In addition to the data available on the portals of the Municipal entities, among the sources useful for calculating the indicators is the DataHub portal, where information relating to the Municipalities of the Metropolitan City of Milan is available.
3. Calculate the rate of progress of an Indicator in the direction of Adaptation
The MRV - Monitoring-Reporting-Evaluation - method, created and implemented by the EU with the EUROSTAT evaluation system on the SDGs of the UN Agenda 2030, can be applied to each indicator with or without a quantitative threshold (benchmark), through the CAGR function and allows to describe an adaptation factor in the PSIR logical framework.
In particular, the method allows to monitor:
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the trend of a single indicator with respect to the degree of adaptation.
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the speed of such movement,
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the effectiveness of the interventions implemented.
3.1 Assessment of the rate of progress indicators without benchmarks.
With respect to the base year and the time interval taken into consideration, an indicator can have an oscillation between 1% and -1%: a variation of 1% is considered significant and this threshold should not be confused with the level of ambition of the objectives. In particular, reference is made to the following scale of values:
3.2 Evaluation of the rate of progress indicators with benchmarks.
In this case, once the time interval to be analyzed has been specified, the distance from the threshold defined for the indicator (defined by law, technique or voluntarily) must be taken into account. In particular, the following scale of values is referred to:
The increase of a specific indicator value in a period of time (generally 3 to 5 years) does not automatically mean an improvement situation : the evaluation must be contextualized with respect to the type of indicator chosen. The following example (in this case the "land consumption" indicator does not take into account the threshold set by the 2006 PTM):
4. Assess the level of progress in achieving the DUP Objective through a Dashboard
By analyzing trends in specific indicator groups, it's possible to measure progress toward or deviation from the DUP Objective through a SCORE function. This function weights individual indicator results to produce a final outcome for the target DUP Objective, visualized through its respective dashboard.
The dashboards enable:
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Analysis of results over a completed time period, typically short-term (3-5 years);
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Projected progress (or regression) toward the 2030 target, as defined by the Metropolitan City of Milan’s 2030 Agenda.
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To populate the dashboard tables, enter values in the yellow cells of the "DATA" sheet under the following columns:
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"Base year": Starting value for tracking progress toward the Objective.
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"Target year": Either the value achieved in the most recent year under review or the projected value relative to the 2030 target year.
In the sheet “Ob. [number - name of Strategic Objective]” you can view:
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rate of progress (CAGR) for single indicator,
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normalized progress rate (SCORE) for each indicator,
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SCORE DUP goal viewable both numerically and graphically with the Dashboard.
Depending on the result obtained, the evaluation will have values as indicated in the following table and the outcome will be displayed in the respective dashboard:
SCORE DUP
In summary, the procedural framework for correctly monitoring and evaluating the rate of progress towards a DUP Strategic Objective is as follows:
