Measuring urban vulnerability to climate change using an integrated approach, assessing climate risks in Beijing.

Mingshun Zhang,Zelu Liu,Meine Pieter Van Dijk

doi:10.7717/peerj.7018

Mingshun Zhang, Zelu Liu + Show 1 more

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https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7018

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Abstract

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.

Highlights

A vulnerability assessment can be a useful tool for providing information about where we are with regard to the development of the adaptive capacity of a city and the adaptation activities of the population with respect to climate change (Amaru & Chhetri, 2013)
The Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) has been applied, together with expert judgment for integrating weighted indicators into the index of vulnerability. We find that this method is useful for cities like Beijing, where there is a lack of data, where the situation may differ in different locations and where it is impossible to use a large numbers of indicators for measuring vulnerability to climate change
The preliminary Impact Oriented Monitoring (IOM) on priority climatic threats in Beijing is presented in Fig. 3, which shows that the priority climatic threats in Beijing are urban drainage floods, high temperature and heat waves and water scarcity and drought

Summary

Introduction

A vulnerability assessment can be a useful tool for providing information about where we are with regard to the development of the adaptive capacity of a city and the adaptation activities of the population with respect to climate change (Amaru & Chhetri, 2013). The attention given to it is still not equal to mitigation with regard to target-setting, financing, and institutional frameworks’’. By establishing an explicit long-term adaptation goal in Article 7, the Paris Agreement (UNFCCC, 2015) builds on an international consensus on the need of vulnerability reduction and confirms that adaptation to climate change is a key pillar of UNFCCC. Magnan and Ribera observe as a challenge that climate change adaptation achieves ’’equal prioritization with mitigation (given) the relative fuzziness of adaptation as a policy area’’.

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