Mapping climate change-caused health risk for integrated city resilience modeling

Abstract

Changes in climatic conditions, together with urban population growth, are making the development of tools to help disaster planners and policy makers select mitigation and adaptation measures a priority. The Coastal Cities at Risk (CCaR) project is a multidisciplinary team project involving four large coastal cities: Manila (The Philippines), Bangkok (Thailand), Lagos (Nigeria) and Vancouver (Canada). One of the project objectives includes development of a system dynamics simulation model to assess the resilience of the participating cities to climate change caused by sea level rise and riverine flooding. The resilience model is designed to integrate physical, economic, health, social and organizational impacts of climate change. This paper presents the methodology for providing spatial and temporal information on climate change health impacts for use in the resilience simulator. Basic population data, disease burden and physical conditions are integrated in the development of a composite health impact map. The output of this mapping exercise provides a more fully integrated view of population health to allow for the development of more targeted adaptive and risk reduction strategies at a local level for the City of Metro Vancouver. This methodology has been applied using data for 3 years, 2001, 2006 and 2011 in order to give a dynamic simulation of health impacts using the resilience simulator. The final maps indicate that the Richmond and Delta regions of Metro Vancouver are more vulnerable to climate change caused by sea level rise and flooding compared to other municipalities. The paper demonstrates how composite health impact maps can be used both as an input for resilience modeling, as well as a “stand-alone” product for the assessment and development of mitigation and adaptive strategies for coastal cities.