The global climate change risk projections published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) not only inform local urban resilience strategies by detailing the magnitude and nature of future hazards but also necessitate immediate, integrated, and equity-focused local actions due to the rapidly increasing severity of climate impacts in urban areas.
The IPCC's findings emphasize that the world is likely to exceed 1.5°C of warming in the near term (until 2040) in most considered scenarios, meaning every increment of global warming will intensify multiple and concurrent hazards. This compels cities to adopt transformative strategies to protect vulnerable populations and infrastructure.
1. How Global Risk Projections Inform Local Urban Resilience
IPCC projections provide the scientific foundation for local risk assessments and long-term planning by defining the specific types and escalating scales of hazards cities must prepare for:
• Escalating and Uneven Risks: Risks and adverse impacts will escalate with every increment of global warming (very high confidence). The IPCC recognizes that climate change variability, extreme events, and structural changes have major impacts on human living conditions and natural systems. Critically, observed adverse impacts are concentrated among economically and socially marginalized urban residents (high confidence). This informs local vulnerability assessments that must prioritize marginalized populations.
• Intensified Urban Heat and Extremes: Hot extremes have intensified in cities. With further warming, every region is projected to experience concurrently and multiple changes in climatic impact-drivers, such as more frequent compound heatwaves and droughts. This projection directly informs the urgent need for local actions focused on mitigating the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect.
• Infrastructure Compromise: Observed climate change has already compromised urban infrastructure, including transportation, water, sanitation, and energy systems, due to both extreme and slow-onset events, resulting in economic losses and service disruptions (high confidence). Future projections of intensified heavy precipitation, increased flooding risks, and unavoidable sea level rise extending beyond 2100 necessitate the design of climate-resilient infrastructure.
• Health Hazards: In the near term, climate hazards are expected to increase heat-related human mortality and morbidity, as well as the incidence of food-borne, water-borne, and vector-borne diseases (high confidence). This directly informs the creation of local Heat-Health Action Plans (HHAPs) and the strengthening of public health programs.
• Constraints on Adaptation: The IPCC informs cities that the effectiveness of adaptation will decrease with increasing warming. Above 1.5°C, ecosystems like coastal wetlands and warm-water coral reefs will reach or surpass hard adaptation limits, which means that Ecosystem-based Adaptation measures (like urban greening) will lose effectiveness if deep mitigation is delayed. This emphasizes the urgency of immediate action.
2. The Necessity of Local Urban Resilience Strategies
The profound and rapidly increasing global risks necessitate a fundamental shift in local urban planning toward integrated, multi-sectoral, and equitable resilience strategies.
A. Integrating Adaptation, Mitigation, and Development
Local resilience strategies are necessitated because climate change critically influences key goals related to poverty reduction, water, food, energy, education, and health in developing countries.
• Climate Resilient Development: Climate change risk necessitates Climate Resilient Development, which integrates adaptation and GHG mitigation to advance sustainable development for all. This approach must recognize that current climate vulnerability is unevenly distributed and low-latitude, less-developed areas are generally at greatest risk due to higher sensitivity and lower adaptive capacity.
• Mainstreaming Approach: Adaptation must be tackled within the context of general development policy objectives. The goal of mainstreaming assessments is to ensure that current and future development policies are well adapted to the climate. This is illustrated by case studies showing that improving road infrastructure resilience in Mozambique against future floods and implementing rainwater harvesting in Tanzania to cope with precipitation variability directly addresses climate risks within development contexts.
• Avoiding Maladaptation: Projected increases in risks demand that cities adopt flexible, multi-sectoral, inclusive, long-term planning to avoid maladaptation. Actions focusing on isolated sectors or short-term gains (e.g., building seawalls without a long-term plan) can lock in vulnerability and increase exposure in the long term.
B. Utilizing Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) as Core Resilience Infrastructure
The escalating risks, particularly from urban heat and flooding, make Nature-Based Solutions (NBS) a necessary component of urban resilience.
• Mitigating Heat Extremes: Green/natural and blue infrastructure can reduce energy use and risk from extreme events like heatwaves, flooding, and heavy precipitation. NBS, such as urban forests, green roofs, and vegetated areas, are proven to significantly reduce heat absorption, lower surface temperatures, and dampen thermal extremes. For example, studies project that ambitious NBS scenarios in Bangkok could reduce heatwave frequency by up to 24 days and shorten average heatwave duration by over 30 days in urban hotspots.
• Multi-Functionality: NBS provides a complementary approach to traditional grey infrastructure. They offer multifunctionality, simultaneously managing stormwater, creating habitats, filtering air pollutants, and enhancing social well-being. This efficiency is essential given the multiple, interconnected challenges amplified by global climate change (e.g., heat, pollution, flooding).
C. Prioritizing Equity and Inclusion
The disproportionate impact of climate risks on vulnerable communities makes prioritizing equity and social justice a necessary pillar of local resilience strategy.
• Targeting Vulnerability: Local resilience strategies must use frameworks, such as the Heat Vulnerability Index (HVI), to map areas of high exposure and low adaptive capacity. This is crucial for identifying areas of critical vulnerability, such as central Bangkok districts characterized by extreme heat, minimal green space, and high density.
• GEDSI Frameworks: Climate risks necessitate the adoption of inclusive frameworks like the Gender Equality, Disability, and Social Inclusion (GEDSI) Action Plan. This ensures that adaptation measures address the specific needs of groups like informal settlement residents, the elderly, and women, who face heightened risks due to factors like poor housing or caregiving responsibilities.
• Enhancing Adaptive Capacity: Adaptation outcomes are enhanced by integrating climate adaptation into social protection programs. Effective resilience strategies include improving access to finance to reduce climate risk for low-income and marginalized communities, especially those living in informal settlements (high confidence).
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