Reconnecting Cities to the Biosphere: Stewardship of Green Infrastructure and Urban Ecosystem Services

Climate policy, both mitigation and adaptation, by nature addresses a collective action problem, sometimes with no clearly identifiable organization or individual responsible to be steered to solve the problem. Both adaptation and mitigation have emerged into an arena of environmental regulation, where related issues, have been addressed in the last three decades with increasing numbers of measures. This chapter suggests that one important issue is that climate change has not yet been sufficiently integrated into the state regulative structure of legislation and policy-making. It discusses implementation of climate policy in the Nordic context. A growing focus on climate change adaptation has been developed mainly in relation to large-scale flood event risk, considerations which resulted in a national requirement that all Danish municipalities must develop climate adaptation plans by the end of 2013. Generally with regard to mitigation in the housing sector, Norwegian climate and energy policy broadly follows that of the EU.