scholarly journals From Urban Façade to Green Foundation: Re-Imagining the Garden City to Manage Climate Risks

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 4-8
Author(s):  
Rob Swart ◽  
Wim Timmermans ◽  
Jos Jonkhof ◽  
Hasse Goosen

<div><p>Climate risk management evolves rapidly from one additional challenge for urban planning into a radical driver of urban development. In addition to fundamental changes in urban planning to increase long-term resilience, the creation of new opportunities for sustainable transformation is imperative. While urban planners increasingly add climate risks to their menu, implementation of effective action is lagging. To reduce urban infrastructure’s vulnerability to heat and flooding, cities often rely on short-term incremental adjustments rather than considering longer-term transformative solutions. The transdisciplinary co-development of inspiring urban visions with local stakeholders over timescales of decades or more, can provide an appealing prospect of the city we desire—a city that is attractive to live and work in, and simultaneously resilient to climate hazards. Taking an historic perspective, we argue that re-imagining historical urban planning concepts, such as the late 19<sup>th</sup>-century garden city until early 21st century urban greening through nature-based solutions, is a pertinent example of how climate risk management can be combined with a wide-range of socio-economic and environmental goals. Climate knowledge has expanded rapidly over the last decades. However, climate experts mainly focus on the refinement of and access to observations and model results, rather than on translating their knowledge effectively to meet today’s urban planning needs. In this commentary we discuss how the two associated areas (urban planning and climate expertise) should be more fully integrated to address today’s long-term challenges effectively.</p></div>

2015 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
pp. 536-553 ◽  
Author(s):  
Glenn McGregor

Climate risk management has emerged over the last decade as a distinct area of activity within the wider field of climatology. Its focus is on integrating climate and non-climate information in order to enhance the decision-making process in a wide range of climate-sensitive sectors of society, the economy and the environment. Given the burgeoning pure and applied climate science literature that addresses a range of climate risks, the purpose of this progress report is to provide an overview of recent developments in the field of climatology that may contribute to the risk assessment component of climate risk management. Data rescue and climate database construction, hurricanes and droughts as examples of extreme climate events and seasonal climate forecasting are focused on in this report and are privileged over other topics because of either their fundamental importance for establishing event probability or scale of societal impact. The review of the literature finds that historical data rescue, climate reconstruction and the compilation of climate data bases has assisted immensely in understanding past climate events and increasing the information base for managing climate risk. Advances in the scientific understanding of the causes and the characterization of hurricanes and droughts stand to benefit the management of these two extreme events while work focused on unravelling the nature of ocean–atmosphere interactions and associated climate anomalies at the seasonal timescale has provided the basis for the possible seasonal forecasting of a range of climate events. The report also acknowledges that despite the potential of climate information to assist with managing climate risk, its uptake by decision makers should not be automatically assumed by the climatological community.


2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-116
Author(s):  
Klaus Keller ◽  
Casey Helgeson ◽  
Vivek Srikrishnan

Accelerating global climate change drives new climate risks. People around the world are researching, designing, and implementing strategies to manage these risks. Identifying and implementing sound climate risk management strategies poses nontrivial challenges including ( a) linking the required disciplines, ( b) identifying relevant values and objectives, ( c) identifying and quantifying important uncertainties, ( d) resolving interactions between decision levers and the system dynamics, ( e) quantifying the trade-offs between diverse values under deep and dynamic uncertainties, ( f) communicating to inform decisions, and ( g) learning from the decision-making needs to inform research design. Here we review these challenges and avenues to overcome them. ▪  People and institutions are confronted with emerging and dynamic climate risks. ▪  Stakeholder values are central to defining the decision problem. ▪  Mission-oriented basic research helps to improve the design of climate risk management strategies.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Thaler ◽  
Philipp Babcicky ◽  
Christoph Clar ◽  
Thomas Schinko ◽  
Sebastian Seebauer

&lt;p&gt;Hydro-metrological events cause substantial economic damage and social disruption in our society to date. These climate-related risks will become even more severe in the future, driven by changes in the frequency and magnitude of natural hazard events, an increasing exposure of buildings or infrastructure, as well as vulnerability and resilience developments of residents and businesses. Although these long-term developments are of major social and economic relevance, decisions in disaster risk management and their (potential) impacts are typically assessed as singular events and potential alternative solutions, which have not been considered, are out of scope. Recent research therefore suggests to employ the concept of iterative climate risk management (CRM), in order to align disaster risk management and climate change adaptation policy and practice. This is supposed to increase the awareness of how complex and dynamic the challenge of comprehensively tackling climate-related risks is.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pathways aims to fill this gap by analysing the long-term development of past and future decisions. The arenas in which these decisions are made are characterised by (1) competing interests from various policy areas, (2) ad-hoc decisions often taking precedence over strategic planning for long-term CRM, and (3) previous decisions providing carry-over, follow-up or creating even lock-in effects for later decisions. Focusing on two climate-adaptation regions in Austria (so-called KLAR!-regions), Pathways paints a comprehensive picture of how local adaptation pathways were developed in the past, how these pathways led to specific decisions at specific points in time, and which impacts these choices had on community development with respect to the choices and pathways not taken. Pathways learns from the past to inform the future with the aim to provide capacity building at the local level. By understanding how earlier decisions enabled or constrained the later decisions, pathways offers policy guidance for making robust decisions in local CRM.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;p&gt;Pathways applies a mixed-method approach to integrate quantitative and qualitative social science research methods and to triangulate the research objectives from different perspectives. Semi-structured interviews with key CRM actors at various levels of government, geo-spatial analysis, secondary analysis of census data and archival research jointly inform the reconstruction of past decision points and related pathways. This approach allows to test, compare, confirm, and control the collected data and the interpreted results from different perspectives, while avoiding narrow, oversimplifying explanations. Building on the lessons learnt from the past, future pathways are co-designed with local stakeholders in Formative Scenario workshops. Pathways restricts its scope to climate-related risks from extreme hydro-meteorological events and geological mass movements, such as riverine floods and pluvial torrents, mud and debris flow, landslides or avalanches. This risk domain requires governance structures for immediate response to the disaster as well as for prevention and relief/reconstruction. Pathways aims to improve the knowledge base for respective governance efforts.&lt;/p&gt;


2020 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 1067-1111 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philipp Krueger ◽  
Zacharias Sautner ◽  
Laura T Starks

Abstract According to our survey about climate risk perceptions, institutional investors believe climate risks have financial implications for their portfolio firms and that these risks, particularly regulatory risks, already have begun to materialize. Many of the investors, especially the long-term, larger, and ESG-oriented ones, consider risk management and engagement, rather than divestment, to be the better approach for addressing climate risks. Although surveyed investors believe that some equity valuations do not fully reflect climate risks, their perceived overvaluations are not large.


Eos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vivek Srikrishnan ◽  
Richard Alley ◽  
Klaus Keller

Integrating Earth science research and observations into adaptation planning helps identify effective strategies to manage climate risks.


2017 ◽  
Vol 14 ◽  
pp. 293-304 ◽  
Author(s):  
Atte Harjanne ◽  
Riina Haavisto ◽  
Heikki Tuomenvirta ◽  
Hilppa Gregow

Abstract. Weather, climate and climate change can cause significant risks to businesses and public administration. However, understanding these processes can also create opportunities. Information can help to manage these risks and opportunities, but in order to do so, it must be in line with how risk management and decision making works. To better understand how climate risks and opportunities are reflected in different organizational processes and what types of information is needed and used, we conducted a study on the perceptions and management of weather and climate risks in Finnish organizations and on their use of weather and climate information. In addition, we collected feedback on how the existing climate information tools should be developed. Data on climate risk management was collected in an online survey and in one full-day workshop. The survey was aimed to the Finnish public and private organizations who use weather and climate data and altogether 118 responses were collected. The workshop consisted of two parts: weather and climate risk management processes in general and the development of the current information tools to further address user needs.We found that climate risk management in organizations is quite diverse and often de-centralized and that external experts are considered the most useful sources of information. Consequently, users emphasize the need for networks of expertise and sector-specific information tools. Creating such services requires input and information sharing from the user side as well. Better temporal and spatial accuracy is naturally asked for, but users also stressed the need for transparency when it comes to communicating uncertainties, and the availability and up-to-datedness of information. Our results illustrate that weather and climate risks compete and blend in with other risks and changes perceived by the organizations and supporting information is sought from different types of sources. Thus the design and evaluation of climate services should take into account the context of existing and developing processes in organizational risk management.


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