Abstract
This paper proposes an index-based assessment tool to consolidate diverse opinions of various stakeholders on their assessments of sector-specific risks posed by climate change, and to aggregate these opinions into intuitive and comparable graphs. This tool enables cities to measure and monitor the multiple factors that contribute to their resilience towards climate risk and hazard in the long term. We applied this tool to five key infrastructure sectors in six representative cities in the Yangtze River Delta region. The graphs generated provide for the first time first-hand insights into the aggregative understanding of various stakeholders with regard to the current and future climate risk in their concerned sectors and cities. Our results indicate that a high level of exposure is not automatically associated with a high level of vulnerability across our selected cities. While all cities need to make efforts to reduce their vulnerability towards climate hazards, those characterized by “lower level of exposure but higher level of vulnerability” need to make more urgent and much greater efforts.
Highlights
Climate change is considered to increase the frequency and intensity of environmental hazards, largely as a result of simultaneous superposition of weather and climate extremes on a variety of timescales, along with the emergence of new hazards and new vulnerabilities [1]
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [3] defines climate change risk as the combination of the possibility of occurrence of adverse climate events and its consequences, which are associated with exposure and vulnerability of the affected groups
We developed an assessment tool to assess the climate hazards and their impacts on infrastructure for the region, known as the (Yangtze River Delta) Climate and Infrastructure Assessment Tool (CIAT), based on the answers and the notes taken in the focus group discussions
Summary
Climate change is considered to increase the frequency and intensity of environmental hazards, largely as a result of simultaneous superposition of weather and climate extremes on a variety of timescales, along with the emergence of new hazards and new vulnerabilities [1]. Climate change has become a critical concern for policy-makers in their strategic planning and decision-making, in addition to the growing concern by scientists and the public [2]. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) [3] defines climate change risk as the combination of the possibility of occurrence of adverse climate events and its consequences, which are associated with exposure and vulnerability of the affected groups. It is clear that changed urban climatic conditions drive demands for risk assessment and management so that adaptation and mitigation policies can be made to reduce climate-related uncertainties and risks [4,5]
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