Abstract
Urban areas are dynamic, facing evolving hazards, having interacting strategic services and assets. Their management involves multiple stakeholders bringing additional complexity. Potential impacts of climate dynamics may aggravate current conditions and the appearance of new hazards. These challenges require an integrated and forward-looking approach to resilient and sustainable urban development, being essential to identify the real needs for its achievement. Several frameworks for assessing resilience have been developed in different fields. However, considering the focus on climate change and urban services, specific needs were identified, particularly in assessing strategic urban sectors and their interactions with others and with the wider urban system. A resilience assessment framework was developed directing and facilitating an objective-driven resilience diagnosis of urban cities and services. This supports the decision on selection of resilience measures and the development of strategies to enhance resilience, outlining a path to co-build resilience action plans, and to track resilience progress in the city or service over time. This paper presents the framework and the main results of its application to three cities having diverse contexts. It was demonstrated that the framework highlights where cities and urban services stand, regarding resilience to climate change, and identifies the most critical aspects to improve, including expected future impacts.
Highlights
Urban areas are complex, vulnerable and continuously evolving systems
Considering the challenges of urban areas related to the potential effects of climate dynamics, enhancing urban resilience requires: (i) identification of the real needs, (ii) sustainable action planning and (iii) assessing progress
It provides a means to assess resilience progress, contributing to an integrated and forward-looking approach to resilient and sustainable urban development. It may facilitate communication among different stakeholders and between different decision levels. The application of this framework to Bristol, Barcelona and Lisbon cities have demonstrated that the Resilience Assessment Framework (RAF) is a tool that provides support to a structured assessment of urban resilience to climate change with a focus on water
Summary
In these dynamic areas, the existence of interacting strategic services and of interdependent services and assets, as well as the involvement of a multiplicity of stakeholders, adds complexity to their management. As referred to in [3], following the World Economic Forum 2014, by 2050, exposure of city dwellers to various hazards, including earthquakes, tsunamis, urban floods, cyclones and storm surges, is expected to double. These challenges require an integrated and forward-looking approach to resilient and sustainable urban development, incorporating the interdependencies between systems as well as including stakeholders and citizens perceptions and needs. A relevant consideration in all of these agendas is the incorporation of assessment steps for tracking their implementation [4]
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