scholarly journals Urban vulnerability and resilience to climate change

2015 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Rafael
2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (5) ◽  
pp. 1811-1821 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. Tromeur ◽  
R. Ménard ◽  
J.-B. Bailly ◽  
C. Soulié

Abstract. Natural hazards, due to climate change, are particularly damaging in urban areas because of interdependencies of their networks. So, urban resilience has to face up to climate risks. The most impacting phenomenon is the urban heat island (UHI) effect. The storage capacity of heat is depending on shapes of buildings, public spaces, spatial organization, transport or even industrial activities. So, adaptive strategies for improving urban climate could be possible in different ways. In the framework of the French project Resilis, this study characterises urban vulnerability and resilience in terms of energy needs of buildings and outside urban comfort according to the IPCC carbon dioxide emission scenarios B2 and A2 for the period 2050–2100 for 10 French cities. The evolutions of four climate indicators in terms of heating and cooling needs and number of hours when the temperature is above 28 °C are then obtained for each city to analyse climate risks and their impacts in urban environment.


PeerJ ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 ◽  
pp. e7018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingshun Zhang ◽  
Zelu Liu ◽  
Meine Pieter van Dijk

This study is responding to the recommendation made by IPCC’s fifth Assessment Report on establishing a standard for measuring and reporting climate risk and vulnerability. It exemplifies the assessment of urban vulnerability to climate change by an integrated approach. The results indicate that Beijing is highly exposed to multiple climate threats in the context of global climate change, specifically urban heat waves, urban drainage floods and drought. Vulnerabilities to the climatic threats of heat waves, drainage floods and droughts have increased by 5%–15% during the period of 2008–2016 in Beijing. High vulnerabilities to both heat waves and drainage floods have been observed in the urban downtown area and high vulnerability to droughts have been observed in the outskirts. This vulnerability assessment, which addressed climatic threats, provides a holistic understanding of the susceptibility to climate change that could facilitate adaptation to climate change in the future. The developments of threats like flooding, heat waves and droughts are analyzed separately for 16 districts and an integrated vulnerability index for all of Beijing is provided as well.


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