Risk Management Model of Urban Resilience Under a Changing Climate

Introduction to <i>Climate Change Adaptation in New York City: Building a Risk Management Response</i>

A GIS-based framework for high-level climate change risk assessment of critical infrastructure

The influence of climate change has become a global concern that is increasingly felt by people around the world, including Indonesia. Climate change has an impact on various sectors, such as the food sector (agriculture, fisheries, marine), health, the environment, water resources, and many more. Urban areas are one of the vulnerable areas affected by climate change. In anticipating climate change through adaptation and mitigation efforts in a city’s resilience to current and future climate variability is crucial for an urban area. Based on data from the Indonesian Disaster Risk Index (IRBI) for 2022, Magelang City is included in the medium category. Research on urban resilience analysis in the context of mitigating the consequences of climate change is carried out as a basis for developing urban adaptation/mitigation strategies. This research was carried out with the aim of identifying and determining indicators of city resilience to climate change and carrying out a vulnerability analysis of each location/region potentially affected by climate change. The indicators used in the research are the Urban Community Resilient Assessment (UCRA) Indicators. UCRA is an indicator for measuring urban resilience developed by the World Research Institute (WRI). There are three Indicator Categories developed by UCRA, namely urban vulnerability, Community Resilience, and Community Preparedness. In Magelang City, the most vulnerable indicators of urban vulnerability are the poor population and access to urban services. In analyzing community resilience, the indicators that need to be considered are the early warning system and government support. Meanwhile, the individual capacity that needs to be considered is increasing readiness to face climate risks and economic resources are important.

Cities are at the forefront of the battle against climate change. We are the source of approximately 80% of global greenhouse gas emissions. And as the climate changes, densely populated urban areas—particularly coastal cities—–will disproportionately feel the impacts. Those of us in local government recognize the importance of national and international leadership on climate change. But we are not waiting for others to act first. Under PlaNYC, New York City's comprehensive sustainability plan, most of our efforts have focused on reducing our greenhouse gas emissions. Initiatives including the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan, which will increase energy efficiency of existing buildings, and retrofitting ferries to use cleaner fuel, will help us meet our goal of reducing the city's emissions by 30% by 2030. These actions alone, however, will not stop climate change. We already face climate risks today, including heat waves, blackouts, flooding, and coastal storms. With climate change these risks will only increase. To ensure that New York City is resilient to existing and future climate risks, we must take further action. Through a generous contribution from the Rockefeller Foundation, I convened the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC), which gathered the leading climate change scientists, academics, and insurance, risk management and legal experts. These experts helped develop a framework and tools to assist the City create a risk-based response to climate change that is grounded in state-of-the-art science information. In February 2009, the NPCC released the most detailed climate risk information for any major city in the world; this volume of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences presents the NPCC's full findings. The NPCC climate change projections put numbers to what we already know: climate change is real and could have serious consequences for New York if we do not take action. I appreciate the hard work of the members of the New York City Panel on Climate Change. Through PlaNYC, the City will build on their work as we craft strategies to improve the city's resilience to climate. Building climate resilience can take many forms, including increasing our understanding of climate risks and vulnerabilities, hardening facilities and assets to prevent impacts, educating vulnerable populations about risks, and ensuring that we can quickly resume operations after weather events occur. In the coming months, the New York City Climate Change Adaptation Task Force, another PlaNYC initiative, will release a plan detailing how Task Force members will prepare the city's critical infrastructure for warmer temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, and rising sea levels. Planning for climate change today is less expensive than rebuilding an entire network after a catastrophe. We simply can't wait to plan for the effects of climate change. The NPCC and Rockefeller Foundation's contributions to the City's climate resilience efforts will help ensure that we create a greener, greater New York for future generations. In 2008, Mayor Bloomberg established the New York City Panel on Climate Change (NPCC), with the mandate to provide New York City with the most up-to-date and comprehensive scientific, technical, and socioeconomic information about climate change and its impacts on the city and environs. Climate Change Adaptation in New York City: Building a Risk Management Response is the first report of the NPCC. The report will help New York City develop, adopt, and implement policies to adapt the city's critical infrastructure to the changing climate. This NPCC report outlines a powerful and novel framework for deploying sophisticated tools of risk management to address the city's climate adaptation challenges, and details with rigor and insight the critical challenges that climate change poses to New York City's energy, transportation, water, and communications systems. The report also presents a coordinated set of climate projections prepared by the NPCC to be used by the many public agencies and private-sector organizations that manage critical infrastructure in the region as they develop adaptation strategies, and it describes how legal and regulatory tools can support adaptation policies. The challenges facing the insurance industry and the use of insurance to reduce climate risks are also described at length. A final section sets forth the indicators and monitoring activities needed to inform Flexible Adaptation Pathways as the City and region move forward. The NPCC report is the product of the committed scientists and experts in the New York City region who served as authors, led by Co-chairs Cynthia Rosenzweig and William Solecki. The dedicated Science and Policy Team at the Columbia Earth Institute and the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities organized the process that has resulted in the production of this landmark report. It is becoming recognized throughout the world that cities have a crucial role to play in responding to climate change. The NPCC 2010 Report puts climate change adaptation in New York City in the broader national and international contexts and helps establish New York City as a thought and policy leader in this urgent endeavor. Climate Change Adaptation in New York City will be widely read around the world, both for its specific insights and also as a roadmap for other cities in preparing plans for climate change adaptation. The work of the NPCC is a pioneering activity for which all New Yorkers, and all others around the world who will benefit, should be most grateful. The Rockefeller Foundation also merits our gratitude for the generous support it has provided to this endeavor. Climate change will have a profound impact on New York City and its residents as it alters environmental baselines on which the urban infrastructure was built. Despite this, both the City and its stakeholders have a wide range of tools and resources with which to respond to the problem. Key insights in the following report derive from the highly integrated connections between science and public policy as they relate to climate change. The New York City Panel on Climate Change, for example, comprises a number of scientists and other technical experts capable of considering the issues at hand with a view to understanding the potential impacts of climate change and options for adaptation. The City University of New York is well placed to contribute to the multifaceted complex questions of climate change and how the city will be affected. This requires a multidisciplinary approach that can draw from the deep resources of the colleges that make up our institution. In addition, the New York City Panel on Climate Change had ongoing, continuous, and fruitful communication with the Mayor's Office of Long Term Planning and Sustainability, and the New York City Climate Change Adaptation Task Force. The collaborations brought forward in this document embody the culmination of a first step in a science–policy linkage that will be required to effectively address climate change in New York City. In addition, these collaborations show how great universities in a great city can link together to make a positive difference in the lives of its citizens.

Urban Disasters and Resilience in Asia

Large conservation opportunities exist in >90% of tropic-subtropic coastal habitats adjacent to cities

Urban infrastructure in Central Asia—specifically in the cities of Almaty and Astana (Kazakhstan), Ashgabat (Turkmenistan), Bishkek (Kyrgyzstan), Dushanbe (Tajikistan), and Tashkent (Uzbekistan)—is increasingly vulnerable to climate change impacts. Despite rapid urbanization, much of the region’s critical urban infrastructure remains outdated and ill-equipped to withstand climate-induced risks. This study assesses and compares the vulnerability of urban infrastructure, examining governance priorities and climate change exposure across the six largest cities in this under-researched region. Based on the urban resilience framework, this study adopts a mixed-methods approach that integrates climate data, city strategies, and governance analyses, ensuring a comprehensive assessment of both the quantitative and qualitative dimensions of urban resilience. The findings reveal substantial variations in urban resilience across the cities, with Astana and Almaty exhibiting stronger financial capacities, while Bishkek and Dushanbe face severe financial and infrastructural constraints. The study underscores the need for adaptive governance mechanisms, integration of climate policy into infrastructure management, and sustainable financing models to build climate-resilient urban environments—lessons applicable to transition economies outside the region.

Chapter 5: Law and regulation

This chapter examines urban resilience building efforts in Harare. The analysis is placed within the urban resilience framework. The Post-2015 development agenda is committed to 'make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable' (SDG 11). For this chapter, urban resilience means the ability of a system, entity, community, or person to adapt to a variety of changing conditions and to withstand shocks while still maintaining its essential functions. The four (4) dimensions of urban resilience namely infrastructure, social, economic and institutional resilience are considered. Harare was purposefully selected as it is one of the pilot local authorities under the "Partnership for Building Urban Resilience in Zimbabwe" programme by the UNDP, UNICEF and Ministry of Local Government, whose goal is to improve urban resilience and strengthen the provision of basic social services and Local Economic Development (LED) targeting unemployed youths, women, and vulnerable groups in urban and peri-urban areas (UNDP Urban Resilience Building Programme Document, 2019). The chapter concludes that there are major gaps in urban resilience building in Harare. The City is characterised by under-investment in critical infrastructure, weak urban planning and governance frameworks (including outdated policy frameworks) and lack of climate adaption planning. These factors not only work against urban resilience building, but they also hinder progress towards achieving resilient, inclusive and sustainable urban communities. For effective urban resilience building, Harare needs to prioritise investment in resilient urban infrastructure (water, sanitation, and storm water), research on the vulnerability of cities and towns, internalising global and national frameworks on climate change through climate adaption planning and strengthening urban planning and governance.

The growing number of cities in the world face a wide range of hazards, which are affected by factors such as the increased urban population and climate change. Urban development and climate change are closely related and interlinked. Today, the direct and indirect effects of climate change can be seen in countries with the lowest effect on global warming and climate change. Cities that are exposed to the risk of climate change are very vulnerable. Climate change is a globally widespread phenomenon. These cities can be said susceptible. In recent years, to cope with the adverse challenges caused by climate change, the concepts of urban ecological resilience, specifically, climate resilience have been introduced. Climate resilience is a type of urban ecological resilience, which is defined as urban resilience to climate change. In this respect, in recent years, two urban resilience concepts have been introduced to reduce these negative effects. Resilience is the ability of a system to absorb the disturbances while maintaining the basic structure in the same way and the functional methods, the capacity for self-organization and the capacity to adapt to stress and change and the capability to build back the system into its condition before a shock or intense change. Adaption to climate change focuses on reducing the vulnerability to these negative changes. Resilience has different aspects, among which climate resilience as a subcategory of urban ecological resilience is considered in this study, which includes the adaptation to and mitigation of the risks and adverse effects of climate. However, urban green infrastructure has various vital functions, including environmental, social, etc. The urban green infrastructure (UGI), according to research, has been effective in reducing the impacts of climate change in cities and enhancing climate resilience. Reviewing existing literature on the urban green infrastructure related to its role in creating urban (climate) resilience, it seems that the features of green infrastructure and which one is effective based on the development, analysis, and evaluation of urban resilience to climate change. These have not been properly addressed so far, and in general, no exact factors have been provided to assess this kind of resilience. It seems that the characteristics of urban green infrastructure can be used as an important factor affecting climate resilience in cities to achieve such factors for assessing the quality of climate resilience. Moreover, the neighborhood scale has not been fully studied in the existing literature. Given the theoretical gap existing in this field, this question arises: How and based on which features of the green infrastructure can we assess and analyze climate resilience in a city?” To answer this question, landscape ecology principles and the relationship between them and green infrastructure in cities were studied. The relationship was developed in the Yousef Abad neighborhood of Tehran and was qualitatively tested using aerial images, field surveys, and preparation of basic and analytical GIS maps. Finally, ‘effective qualities in assessing climate resilience in cities using UGI based on landscape ecology were obtained.

The impact of urban growth and climate change on heat stress in a sub-tropical Australian city

Events related to water systems such as flooding are often evident consequences of inadequate land use and changes in climate that are altering the natural water cycle and are already compromising human health and amenity for urban dwellers. Hereby, transitions to more sustainable ways of water management have been recognized as urgent shifts to achieve necessary resilience in cities. Current discussions point out that approaches that integrate water management into urban development and urban design such as Water sensitive urban design (WSUD) are powerful strategies to support the sustainability of cities. They have the potential to ensure water resilience and also to improve quality of life in urban areas. Due to insufficient planning practices and policies to protect permeable areas and natural resources, Ho Chi Minh City in Vietnam (HCMC) becomes one of the ten top cities worldwide with higher risks for population and infrastructure over flooding events (World bank, 2010). Great part of the city suffers frequent flooding events and severe disruption on built infrastructure and people&rsquo;s wellbeing (Storch et.al. 2002). It shows the urgency in developing integrated planning strategies and policies that that are robust enough to protect the city against flooding risks and improve quality of life in urban areas. The central question that this research aims to investigate is in how far more integrative approaches in water management have the potential to address uncertainty regarding flood risks in HCMC while at the same time, improve quality of life in the urban area. This study is applied to a housing settlement in HCMC and evaluates morphological data by qualitative methods combined with quantitative assessments of flood extends. The expected outcome is to orient the city to adopt more integrative planning practices and policy recommendation for land use control based on water sensitive urban design (WSUD) indicators.

Climate change (CC) is one of the most challenging issues ever faced, as it affects every system worldwide at any scale. Urban areas are not an exception. Extreme weather-related events have seriously affected urban areas in recent years, and they have a significant impact on the welfare of people. According to UN projections, by 2050 more than 68% of the world’s population could be concentrated in urban areas. Additionally, daily life in urban areas is highly dependent on certain critical services and products provided by critical infrastructures (CIs). Therefore, it is especially relevant to understand how CC affects urban CIs in order to develop mechanisms to improve their capacity to handle crises derived from CC. In this context, resilience-based strategies provide a holistic approach, considering both predictable and unpredictable threats. This paper proposes a guide for assessing and enhancing the resilience level of cities against CC, considering urban CIs as key agents in improving the city’s capacity to face and recover from CC-related crises. The guide was developed through a co-creation process in which two cities in the Basque Country (Spain) worked together with CI providers and other relevant stakeholders in the resilience-building process. The resulting guide is to be used by city stakeholders at a strategic level, providing them with: (1) a qualitative assessment of the city’s current resilience level in the CC context; (2) better knowledge about urban CI sectors, their interdependency relationships and the chain of impacts due to cascading effects in the short, medium and in the long term and; (3) a set of policies that enhance city resilience.

Development as adaptation: Framing and measuring urban resilience in Beijing

Cities are rapidly urbanizing and face immense social, economic and environmental challenges. These challenges amplify the climate change impacts, thereby posing a serious threat to urban and social resilience. With regard to climate change, ecological researchers globally advocate that nature-based solutions integrate with various ecosystems based approaches, provide biodiversity benefits and address societal challenges. However, the potential of nature-based solutions to build urban resilience and address climate change through urban planning has remained research rhetoric. This research puts forth an effort to assess the ability of nature-based solutions in building urban resilience and addressing climate change. This research incorporates a quantitative research methodology by undertaking a technical and scientific literature review about nature-based solutions, urban resilience and climate change adaptation. Accordingly, the characteristics, dimensions, areas of application, the challenges and opportunities are highlighted. The key research gap between urban resilience and nature-based solutions is identified by developing a socio-spatial framework that focuses on nature-based solutions tradeoffs and its response to urban resilience. This renewed approach highlights that nature-based solutions are cost-effective multifunctional ecosystem services and offer inclusive benefits, ranging from regenerating urban spaces to improving quality of life and reducing pollution. However, this research limits the application of nature-based solutions for urban resilience to local level urban planning and does not focus on master level urban planning. This research emphasizes nature-based solutions as an effective urban policy tool and reinforces its inclusion in local level urban planning for building climate change and urban resilience.KeywordsNature-based solutionsCitiesUrban resilienceClimate change AdaptationPolicy perspectives