Abstract
As negative impacts of climate change tend to increase in the future, densely-populated cities especially need to take action on being robust against natural hazards. Consequently, there is a growing interest from scientists in measuring the climate resilience of cities and regions. However, current measurements are usually assessed on administrative levels, not covering potential hotspots of hazardous or sensitive areas. The main aim of this paper focusses on the measurement of climate resilience in the City of Dortmund, Germany, using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Based on a literature review, we identified five essential components of climate resilience and initially designed a theoretical framework of 18 indicators. Since climate resilience is still a vague concept in scientific discourses, we implemented local expert knowledge and fuzzy logic modelling into our analysis. The benefit of this study not only lies in the fine-scale application, but also in the relevance for multiple disciplines by integrating social and ecological factors. We conclude that climate resilience varies within the city pattern, with the urban core tending to be less resilient than its surrounding districts. As almost the entire geodata set used is freely available, the presented indicators and methods are to a certain degree applicable to comparable cities.
Highlights
The worldwide issue of climate change, population growth and environmental pollution is becoming increasingly apparent to the general public—including the youth—and is discussed controversial via social media [1,2]
To summarize, predefined metrics on climate resilience in Germany are too abstract for urban planning decisions, as the results would not show distributional effects, but one resilience score for the whole urban fabric or its districts, corresponding to the Modifiable Arial Unit Problem (MAUP) [61]
The formula for transforming land surface temperatures (LST) into estimated physiological equivalent temperature (PET) values is as follows: PET = 17.077 + 0.465 ∗ LST. We applied this formula to our calculated LST values, totally aware of the fact that Dortmund may be confronted with other environmental conditions as Dresden, but both cities are located in Germany, share a similar size in population as well as administrative area and lie on almost the same latitude
Summary
The worldwide issue of climate change, population growth and environmental pollution is becoming increasingly apparent to the general public—including the youth—and is discussed controversial via social media [1,2]. A climate resilient city has the ability to adapt proactively to changing environmental conditions and recover quickly from the negative consequences of external shocks triggered by extreme weather events. A current issue of social-ecological inequalities and extreme weather events is that “there have been relatively few attempts to integrate environmental justice into resilience thinking”, both domains are inextricably intertwined [12,13]. For urban planners, this demands designing settlements and infrastructures to meet the challenges of today’s and tomorrow’s climate, while capturing connections between vulnerabilities and social-environmental challenges [14]. Allows monitoring the progress and effectiveness of devised climate resilience strategies over time
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